There’s a version of June 15 that families imagine before the date finally rolls around. The contact window opens, the cards go on the table, and suddenly everyone knows where they stand.

That’s not always how it goes, though.

What actually happens is that the asymmetry of information that defined the entire process before June 15 doesn’t fully disappear. It just changes shape. Instead of silence, you get conversation. Instead of not knowing if a coach is interested, you’re now hopefully talking to several who are - and they’re each talking to several of you.

Nobody’s lying. Nobody’s being dishonest. But almost nobody is being fully transparent either, because almost nobody can afford to be yet.

What’s happening on your side

You’ve got calls happening. Maybe several. Some of those conversations feel exciting - there’s a genuine connection, with a coach who clearly wants you. Others feel more like maintenance. A program you’re keeping in your back pocket, just in case the ones you really want don’t work out.

Say you’ve got a dream school that’s been warm but vague, and a second program that’s offered you an official visit already and is waiting on you. You’re probably not telling the second program where they actually rank. You don’t want to burn that bridge in case the dream school falls through. So you keep the conversation going. You stay polite, engaged, vaguely positive. “I just need a little more time to make arrangements and talk to my family.”

You’re not necessarily lying to them. You’re just not telling them everything either.

What’s happening on the other side

You’ve probably realized by now that the coaches are doing the exact same thing.

A coach has her own version of your list. A few players she’s genuinely excited about, a few more she’s keeping warm in case her top targets commit elsewhere. She’s not going to tell the second group they’re not the priority, because she might need them. If her first choices go elsewhere, the player she was being politely noncommittal with last week suddenly becomes much more interesting.

This is what happens when both sides are managing finite resources - your time and attention, her roster spots - under conditions where nobody has full information about what the other side is actually going to do.

Why nobody can fully commit yet

The honest answer is that commitment is binary and information is not. You can’t half-commit to a program, and a coach can’t half-offer you a spot. But the information that would make either of you confident enough to fully commit - what other options will materialize, who else might say yes, who else might say no - doesn’t arrive all at once. It trickles in over weeks, sometimes months.

So both sides hedge. Both sides keep multiple conversations alive longer than feels entirely honest, because the alternative is closing a door before you know what’s actually on the other side of it.

There’s a difference, though, between reasonable hedging and stringing someone along.

Keeping a back-pocket program warm while you wait to hear from your top choice is normal. Letting that same program believe they’re your first choice - actively implying interest you don’t have, arranging a visit you have no intention of following up on, accepting a deadline extension you know you’ll use to wait out someone else entirely - starts to cross into something less fair.

The test isn’t whether you’re being fully transparent. Almost nobody is, on either side, right now. The test is whether you’re being honest enough that the other side could make a reasonable decision with the information they have. If a coach asked you directly where you stood and you’d have to lie outright to keep them engaged, that’s usually the signal you’ve gone further than the moment requires.

What this means for you

None of this is something to fix. It’s just the structure of the process right now, and understanding it changes how you experience it.

If a coach seems warm but noncommittal, that’s not necessarily a bad sign. It might just mean she’s managing her own list the same way you’re managing yours. It’s the same if you’re keeping a program on the back burner while you wait to hear from your top choice. It’s just how this period works for almost everyone going through it.

The discomfort of this in-between stage is real, and it can run for weeks or longer. Nobody loves the ambiguity. But it resolves the same way it always does - through time, more information, and eventually someone making the first real move.

You’re not doing anything wrong by being in it. You’re just in it. So is everyone else.

Eventually, someone defines the relationship. That’s how this stage usually ends.

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Get it now for $29/month

The contact window is open. Calls are happening, relationships are building, and for some of you, an offer is going to arrive in the next few weeks, if it hasn’t already.

Before you’ve done a visit.

This isn’t unusual. It happens every year, and it’s a direct consequence of the rule I covered on Tuesday; in-person contact doesn’t begin until August 1, which means official and unofficial visits aren’t possible until then either.

But verbal offers can be made and accepted right now. Which means some families are going to face a decision that, in the abstract, sounds straightforward, but in practice is genuinely hard.

Would you commit to a school without visiting first?

In the hypothetical, most people would say “of course not”. But it’s a different story when you actually have an offer in front of you with a deadline.

What a visit actually gives you

Before we get into strategy, it’s worth being clear about what you’re potentially giving up - and what you’re not.

The single most valuable thing an official or unofficial visit to a college campus provides is something you genuinely cannot replicate any other way: unstructured time with the team without coaches around.

That’s the moment that reveals who these people actually are. Not the highlight reel version, not the version that’s performing for a coach - the real version. How they talk to each other. How they talk to you. Whether you can imagine spending four years in that environment.

When I was structuring official visits, we always scheduled significant blocks of unstructured time with the team for exactly this reason. If that doesn’t go well, it’s game over for both sides. Every coach has a story about a player who was talented on paper, checked every box, and then came on the visit and something was just off.

You cannot get that from a clinic. You can get a surface-level feel from the players working the event and a quick conversation, but it’s not the same as staying overnight, seeing what they do for fun, getting a real read on whether you’d actually fit in among the group.

Nothing replaces it. That’s the honest answer.

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June 15 has come and gone. If you’re in the class of 2028, the contact window is now open - coaches can text you, call you, email you, jump on a video chat. After two years of one-sided communication, that’s a significant shift.

But there’s a part of what changed on Monday that a surprising number of families don’t fully understand. And based on what I’ve been seeing in conversations on The Recruiting Advisor this week, it’s worth being explicit about.

In-person recruiting contact is still not allowed.

Texts, emails, calls, video chats - all permitted. Meeting a coach in person - not permitted. That doesn’t change until August 1. Which means official visits, unofficial visits, and any in-person interaction with a college coach are off the table for the next six weeks.

What this looks like in practice

Every year as a college coach, I’d watch this play out in the same way. A family we’d been talking to virtually would decide in July that they wanted to see campus. Sometimes they’d driven hundreds of miles to get there.

The text would arrive: “Hey Coach! I’m coming to tour your campus today - I’ll be there in a few hours. Could we meet up so I can introduce myself?”

Even if we were on campus - which is no guarantee during a summer of recruiting travel and coaching commitments - we couldn’t meet them. Even if we wanted to.

The response had to be some version of “I’m so sorry, we’re not able to do that until August 1” and the family would be left confused, disappointed, or both.

The same dynamic plays out at summer tournaments. NCC and other major club events are coming up over the next few weeks, and by that point many players will have been in active contact with coaches - calls, texts, the beginning of real relationships. So when a player spots the coach she’s been talking to standing on the sideline, the natural instinct is to go say hello.

That hello is fine. What comes after it isn’t.

Coaches can’t stand and talk and catch up - not because they don’t want to, but because in-person recruiting contact is still impermissible. You might only want to chat about how the tournament is going, but coaches will have to shut it down, especially with their peers watching. It’s not a good look for anyone.

I once worked a three-day summer event where a player I’d been recruiting wanted to debrief about how things were going. We both wanted to have the conversation. We just couldn’t do it in person. So she went home, I went back to my hotel, and we jumpd on a Zoom instead.

It feels absurd. It kind of is absurd. But the rules are the rules, and the penalties for violations are serious enough that no coach is going to risk it.

The simplest way to handle this

Don’t put the coach in the position of having to turn you away. It’s awkward for everyone - not because the coach doesn’t want to talk to you, but because they have no choice. A “we can’t do this in person yet, but I’d love to jump on a call this week” response from a coach isn’t a rejection. It’s a coach following the rules.

August 1 is when in-person contact opens. That’s when official and unofficial visits become possible, when you can walk a campus with a coaching staff, when the relationship moves from screens to real life.

In Thursday’s paid piece, I’ll write about how to think strategically about the window between now and then - because the decisions you make in these six weeks can shape the rest of your recruiting process significantly.

If you want a guide through the post-June 15 madness, The Recruiting Advisor is available 24/7, is trained specifically on field hockey recruiting, and has been busy this week for exactly this reason.

Get it now for $29/month

I hadn’t planned to publish a second newsletter this week, but then I noticed a flurry of activity on The Recruiting Advisor, my AI agent that helps families navigate the process.

The build-up to June 15 predictably brings a spike in usage - and as I reviewed the anonymized conversations, the same pattern kept coming up over and over again: how to answer the questions coaches are going to ask them.

They were feeding the agent specific questions - “what are your strengths and weaknesses,” “why do you want to come here,” “tell me about yourself” - and asking how to handle each one. Preparing answers. Rehearsing responses.

Which reminded me that most players preparing for their first June 15 call have done some version of the same thing. They’ve written notes. They’ve looked up common questions. They feel reasonably prepared going in.

How you answer matters, of course. Just not in the way you might think.

What coaches are actually testing

It’s worth understanding before June 15 that coaches aren’t expecting polished answers. They’ve been on enough calls to know that a 16-year-old talking to a stranger about her future is going to be nervous. It’s normal, and it’s expected.

What they’re listening for is something different.

Can you give me a real answer? Can you tell me something specific - about yourself, about your game, about why you’re interested in this program - that I couldn’t have heard from the last few players I called? And underneath all of that: are you a human being I can imagine coaching for four years?

As a friend of mine at one of the nation’s best programs likes to say: “Can I imagine having an enjoyable conversation with you, sitting in an airport at 6am?”

The player who gives a rehearsed, polished answer that sounds like a college application essay is harder to get a read on than the player who stumbles a little, laughs at herself, and then says something genuine.

Coaches aren’t building a roster of perfect interviews. They’re building a team of people they’ll spend thousands of hours with.

The three patterns that kill calls

1. Naming without claiming

There’s a type of question almost every coach asks some version of.

It might be “what are your core values”, or “what are your strengths and weaknesses”, but at some stage you’ll likely be asked to talk about yourself.

They’ve already seen you play, and now they can finally talk to you, so they’re looking to learn about the person behind the player.

Let's say they go with "how would your teammates describe you?" and the answer is "hardworking, coachable, competitive." That means almost nothing by itself.

The answer that lands is the one with a story attached - a specific moment, a specific situation, something that could only be true of you. Have examples ready. It makes the conversation feel easier and is an early way to show off your personality.

Read more

When I sat down to write this week’s newsletter, I knew it was the last one that would come out before June 15.

I wondered how to capture something that goes beyond the usual last-minute advice, that I’ve given in previous years.

And then I remembered that while every family is anxious about June 15, coaches are too.

If you’re in the class of 2028, you’ve been counting down to June 15 for months. Maybe longer.

So has the coach calling you.

The recruiting conversation is, correctly, always framed around the recruit - the preparation, the anxiety, the waiting. Coaches are presented as the gatekeepers. The ones who do this every year. The ones with the power. The ones who decide. I use that framing myself regularly.

And they do have power. But they’re also humans who have spent the better part of two years building toward a single phone call, and they have no more certainty about how it’s going to go than you do.

Here’s what that looks like from the inside.

The buildup

A coach has been watching you play for two years. Maybe longer. She’s probably seen you play more than 10 times. She’s reviewed your video. She’s had conversations with your club coach. She’s made notes after every evaluation, tracked your development, watched you get better.

You came to her school’s camp, and she loved coaching you. You responded well to the feedback, the vibes were good, the interactions felt easy.

Right before June 15, she sends the packet. The physical one - and among the sales paraphernalia, the handwritten letter that took longer to write than it looks. She’s done this for maybe 15 or 20 recruits. But for each one, she’s tried to make it feel like it was written only for them.

She’s also been doing her intelligence work. Talking to club coaches the way club coaches talk - carefully, professionally, reading between lines. And sometimes a club coach will let something slip. Nothing specific. Just a tone. “She really likes your program. You’re right up there for her.” That’s enough. That gets filed away.

By the time June 15 arrives, she has a picture of you that’s two years in the making. She thinks she knows where you stand. She thinks this is going to go well.

The call

On the other side of the phone, a coach is imagining the same moment you are - just in reverse. The recruit picking up with energy that matches the years of effort. The conversation flowing. The beginning of something.

Sometimes that’s exactly what happens. And when it does, it’s one of the best parts of the job.

But sometimes the response to a scheduling request comes back casual, a little delayed. She can do it in a couple of days. That’s usually not a great sign, but hey, June 15 is insane, she might be only doing a few calls a day to keep herself fresh, it might mean nothing. Except the coach was expecting something closer to excitement, and instead she’s getting availability.

Once the call happens, she knows within 30 seconds.

Maybe the recruit is distracted. Maybe she’s polite but distant. Maybe she says it directly - she’s already made her decision, there’s another program she loves, it’s her dream school, she’s really sorry.

Two years. Gone in a sentence.

What that moment feels like

Coaches aren’t owed anything in this moment. The recruit made her decision and that’s exactly how it should work.

But there’s a particular feeling that comes with two years of building toward something, and then it just isn’t there anymore. The same feeling, I’d imagine, that a player gets when the phone doesn’t ring on June 15 from the program she’d been dreaming about. The same investment. The same sudden absence of something you’d been counting on.

And then, you have to move on. Immediately. There are multiple other calls to make today. The recruit who just said no has made her decision and deserves to be released cleanly. You wish her well, you mean it, and you move forward.

What this means for you

The coach calling you on June 15 has been through some version of this. Maybe not today, but at some point in their career. They know what it feels like to be on the wrong end of a recruiting conversation.

Which means the person who might seem intimidating - the one with the title, the blue-chip program, the scholarship offer - is also a person who has felt the specific sting of this process not going the way they hoped.

That doesn’t lower the stakes. It doesn’t make the call easier. But the next time you imagine the person on the other end of that call as someone who holds all the cards - remember that they’ve also sat where you’re sitting. Waiting for something they’d invested in. Hoping it would go the way they’d imagined.

It doesn’t always. For either side.

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You’ve probably thought a lot about whether coaches will call on June 15. You may not have thought as much about what happens when they do.

Most players prepare for that first call by thinking about what to say. What to answer when they ask about your hockey, your academics, your goals. That’s reasonable preparation. But it’s not what coaches are actually evaluating.

By the time a coach picks up the phone, she already knows your hockey. She’s watched you play. She’s reviewed your video. She has her notes. The call isn’t just an introduction - it’s a confirmation. She’s checking whether the person on the phone matches the player she’s been evaluating for the past year or two.

What she’s listening for isn’t information. It’s signals.

Can you hold a conversation?

Before any of the substance, there’s the small talk. How are you, how’s hockey going, did you have a good weekend?

Coaches are listening to whether the conversation flows or stalls. Whether you show a bit of personality or whether you’re so locked into performing well that you forget to actually be yourself.

A player who can warm up naturally, who laughs easily, who asks the coach a question back - that player is immediately easier to imagine in a locker room, on a bus, in a meeting room for four years.

A deer-in-the-headlights response doesn’t eliminate you. Coaches know this is hard. Talking to a near-stranger about your future, under pressure, with a lot riding on it - that’s not a normal Tuesday for a 16-year-old. Most adults would find it uncomfortable too.

But you’re not trying to do something normal. You’re trying to do something that 90 percent of high school athletes never do. That comes with a cost of entry, and part of that cost is learning to hold yourself together in uncomfortable conversations. The good news is that the more of them you have, the easier it gets.

Read more

It’s June, and if you’re in the recruiting class of 2028, you’be been waiting a while for this month to roll around.

For some of you, the phone is going to ring on June 15. Maybe a lot. Maybe from programs you’ve been hoping to hear from for two years. That’s going to feel as good as you’ve imagined.

For others, it’s going to be quieter than you hoped. Maybe one or two calls from programs that weren’t at the top of your list. Maybe nothing at all from the school you’ve been dreaming about. Maybe just… silence.

This piece is for that second group. And if you’re honest with yourself, you’re probably not sure which group you’re in yet.

Interpreting the silence

Let’s start with what a quiet June 15 doesn’t mean.

It doesn’t mean you’re not good enough. It doesn’t mean your recruiting process is over. It doesn’t mean the last two years of work, travel, tournaments, and emails were wasted. It doesn’t mean you’re behind.

What it usually means is one of a few things, none of which are permanent.

You might be on programs’ lists but not at the top of them. Coaches contact their highest-priority recruits first. If a program is genuinely interested but has others they’re pursuing more urgently, you might not hear from them on June 15 itself - but you might hear from them in the days or weeks that follow.

You might be targeting programs that recruit on a different timeline. Some programs - particularly those with more resources and more certainty about their top targets - move fast. Others are more deliberate, waiting to see how their preferred conversations develop before expanding their list. A quiet June 15 from a program you want isn’t necessarily a no. It might be a not yet.

You might need to adjust your list. This is the harder one to hear, but it’s worth saying honestly. If June 15 passes and programs at your target level aren’t calling, that’s information. It doesn’t mean you can’t play in college. It might mean the level you’ve been targeting and the level coaches are placing you at aren’t aligned yet - and that’s something you can work with.

What the data actually shows

According to Allison Keefe at The Field Hockey Analyst, most D1 players commit in September of their junior year - not June. For D3, it’s the following June.

And in each of the last two recruiting classes, roughly 88-89 players committed to D1 programs after May 1st of their junior year, dispelling the myth that the D1 spots are gone in a matter of months. June 15 opens the contact window. It doesn’t close it.

The handful of players committing on June 15 or in the days immediately after are typically the ones who have done extensive campus visits, built deep relationships with programs over two years, and are ready to say yes the moment the call comes.

That’s a small group. Most recruiting happens in the months that follow - through the summer tournaments, the fall high school season, the official visit period that starts August 1.

If your phone is quieter than you hoped, you are in the majority. You are not behind.

What to do next

Don’t spiral. The worst thing you can do in the 48 hours after June 15 is sit with a quiet phone and let your brain construct a narrative about what it means.

Take stock of who did reach out. Even programs that weren’t your first choice are worth a real conversation. Sometimes the program you weren’t sure about becomes an option when you actually talk to the coaches. Don’t dismiss anything before you’ve given it a fair look.

Reach out to programs on your list that didn’t contact you. June 15 opens the contact window in both directions. If a program has been on your radar and you haven’t heard from them, you can email and express your continued interest. You can ask where you stand. The answer might be disappointing, but it’s better than spending the summer wondering.

Go back to your club coach. If June 15 was quieter than expected, this is the moment to have an honest conversation about where you’re at, what programs might be a better fit, and what the path forward looks like. A good club coach will tell you the truth.

Keep playing well. June 15 is not the last time coaches will watch you play. Summer tournaments are still ahead. The evaluation window doesn’t close because the contact window opened.

The tough stuff

Recruiting is hard in a way that’s difficult to explain to people who haven’t been through it. The uncertainty, the waiting, the trying to read signals from people who aren’t always being fully transparent — it takes a toll. And June 15 has a way of concentrating all of that into a single day in a way that isn’t entirely healthy.

Part of what makes a quiet June 15 hard isn’t just the silence - it’s watching other people’s noise. The commitment posts start going up. Your feed fills with announcements. It can feel like everyone is moving forward while you’re standing still. They’re not. They’re just louder.

Your athletic identity is not determined by how many coaches call you on one day in June. The players I’ve watched handle quiet June 15s well are the ones who treat it as a data point rather than a verdict - who adjust, keep working, and stay in the process long enough for it to play out.

Most recruiting stories don’t end on June 15. They’re usually just beginning.

If you want help navigating what comes next - whether that’s reading the signals from programs or communicating with coaches through the process - I have two $25 resources that can help:

Get The Red Flag Decoder

Get Emails Coaches Actually Read

Gate 21. Flight to Los Angeles, then Sydney.

I’m heading to Australia with the USA Women’s National Hockey Team, and I’m still not entirely sure it’s real.

This time last year, I was finalizing a June 15 contact list.

And the year before that. And the year before that. Late May meant something completely different then - calling club coaches to confirm contact information for prospects, reviewing film on players I’d been tracking for two years, preparing what I was going to say on calls I’d been thinking about for weeks.

June 15 was a date I used to feel in my body. The countdown to it was its own kind of pressure - controlled, purposeful, but pressure nonetheless.

This year I’m at an airport gate instead, heading to the other side of the world with a video analysis bag and a role I still have to pinch myself about.

A few days ago, I had lunch with a friend who also recently stepped away from college coaching. We spent most of it the way you do when two people have left something behind - comparing notes on what we missed, what we didn’t, what surprised us about being on the outside of it.

There was a moment where we both got quiet, and then one of us said it.

“The one thing I’m not going to miss is recruiting.”

It landed the way true things do. We both laughed, and then we both sat with it for a second.

I want to be careful about how I say this, because recruiting is what you’re living right now. It’s real and it’s hard and the stakes feel enormous - because they are. I’m not dismissing that.

But from inside the machine, recruiting has its own particular weight.

The pressure of convincing someone to choose your program over someone else’s. The game-playing. The information you can’t share and the conversations you can’t quite have. The list-building that happens in rooms families never see. The long hours spent on hot sidelines making evaluations you won’t need in most cases.

Stepping out of that room changes how you see it.

June 15 is couple of weeks away. I know what that date feels like from where you’re sitting - the anticipation, the comparison, the questions you can’t answer yet. Will they call? When? What will they say? What happens if they don’t?

I’ve written about this date more times than I can count. The myths around it. The war room mechanics behind it. Why the calls you don’t get on June 15 aren’t the end of the story.

What I haven’t written - what I couldn’t have written until now - is what it feels like to watch it approach from the outside.

From inside the machine, the countdown to June 15 is a logistical problem. You’re managing lists, confirming contact information, and preparing talking points. The families on the other end of those calls are somewhat abstract - names in a database until the moment you hop on the Zoom.

Stepping out of that seat changes the view. The uncertainty families carry through this process - the not knowing, the waiting, the reading into every silence - is real in a way that’s easy to underestimate when you’re the one holding the list. It’s structural. Built into a process where both sides are operating with incomplete information, and the only thing that resolves it is time.

It’s also exactly why I’m not walking away from this newsletter. If anything, stepping out of college coaching clarifies why it matters. Everything I learned about how recruiting actually works - the list mechanics, the budget math, the language coaches use and what it means, the patterns families miss because they’ve never been in the room - none of that leaves with the job title.

I’ll keep writing about it. From a different vantage point now.

The video bag is packed. Australia and New Zealand are waiting.

And June 15 is coming - for you if not for me, this time around.

If you want help navigating what comes next - whether that's reading the signals from programs or communicating with coaches through the process - I have two $25 resources that can help:

Get The Red Flag Decoder

Get Emails Coaches Actually Read

June 15 is just under four weeks away. For current sophomores, that’s the date the phones start ringing - the first time D1 coaches can call you directly, and the beginning of what will feel like the most intense period of your recruiting process.

Some of those calls will be everything you hoped for. The coach knows your game, asks smart questions, and makes you feel like she’s been watching you for months. Maybe she texts you the next day. Maybe there’s a follow-up call. Maybe she mentions a visit.

And then, sometimes, a week or two later - nothing.

No text. Slower email responses. The energy that felt so clear on that first call has quietly disappeared. You’re not sure what happened, or if you did something wrong. You’re not sure whether to reach out or wait.

This piece is about why that happens, and what to do when it does.

The net both sides are casting

Before June 15, neither side has complete information.

Programs have been watching players at tournaments, reviewing video, building lists - but they don’t know for certain which recruits are genuinely interested in them, which will take their call, or which will ultimately want to commit. So some of them cast a wide net.

They might have a tier of eight to ten players they’re genuinely excited about, and another tier of ten to fifteen they’re keeping warm as options.

Recruits are doing the same thing. That’s why I talk about a funnel approach to ensure your list is both wide and deep enough, with good range across dream, reach, realistic, and safety categories. You don’t know who’s going to offer, so you stay engaged with multiple programs until the picture clarifies.

The problem is that when June 15 arrives and both sides start revealing their hands, the picture clarifies unevenly. A program might get strong early responses from three or four players they prefer in a particular tier. Their focus, their bandwidth, their energy - it all starts moving toward those conversations. The players slightly further down that tier experience a communication drop-off.

It’s not usually deliberate. It’s just what happens when humans have finite attention and a recruiting class to fill.

Coaches are running multiple tracks simultaneously, and the most organized programs have systems to manage communication across all of them. But even well-run programs let balls drop. And less organized ones drop them regularly.

Read more

Last week I wrote about why recruiting conversations are so hard to read - the knowledge gap between families doing this for the first time, and coaches who’ve done it hundreds of times. This week, I want to make that more concrete.

Below are three phrases that show up in almost every recruiting process. You’ve probably heard at least one of them. Here’s what they usually mean, when they’re legitimate, and when they’re a warning sign worth paying attention to.

“We’re taking it slow this year”

What it sounds like: We’re being thoughtful and deliberate about recruiting.

What it usually means: You’re not a priority prospect right now — though that’s not always permanent.

The thing families don’t always realize is that “taking it slow” is rarely a program-wide stance. The same coach who tells you things are moving slowly might be in daily contact with another prospect for your position, pushing hard to get her on campus before someone else does.

Programs take it slow with recruits they’re uncertain about - limited evaluations, multiple candidates for one spot, not enough to make a decision yet. They move fast for the recruit they’ve identified as their top target, especially if she has other programs paying attention or making offers.

So the question isn’t whether the program is busy or deliberate. It’s whether you’re the recruit they’d move for if they had to.

Said in June when the contact window has just opened, some patience is normal - programs are still evaluating and genuinely haven’t made decisions. Said several months in with no concrete next steps, it’s doing a lot of work to avoid a more direct conversation.

The test: ask directly - “when do you anticipate your timeline picking up?” - and listen for specificity. Then pay attention to what happens when you mention other programs are showing interest.

A program that’s genuinely interested but managing their calendar will find a way to respond to competitive pressure. One that’s keeping you warm while prioritizing someone else will find reasons why the timing still isn’t right.

“I think you’d be a great fit here”

What it sounds like: We want you, and we’ve thought carefully about why.

What it usually means: Almost anything, which is the problem.

This phrase is one of the most common in recruiting and one of the least informative. Coaches say it to players they’re genuinely excited about. They also say it to players they’re keeping warm, players they’re not sure about, and players they’re being polite to.

It feels meaningful because it’s personal - fit is a real thing, and being told you have it feels like validation. And if a coach is talking to you, you have to assume they like you enough to have engaged in recruiting you.

But notice what it doesn’t say. It doesn’t say we’re offering you. It doesn’t say we’re prioritizing you. It doesn’t say we’ve evaluated you and decided you’re who we want. It says fit, which is warm and vague and hard to challenge.

When a coach says this, the follow-up question is: “What specifically makes you feel that way?” A coach who has genuinely thought about it will have a specific answer. A coach who is managing the conversation will give you something general. The difference tells you where you actually stand.

“Things are moving really fast right now”

What it sounds like: The recruiting process is intense, and a lot is happening.

What it usually means: It depends almost entirely on whether this phrase comes with more contact or less.

This is one of the more honest phrases coaches use - things genuinely do move fast in recruiting cycles, and programs really do get busy.

The question is whether the pace is causing them to engage with you more or less. If they’re reaching out more frequently, scheduling calls, pushing to arrange a visit… then the pace is working in your favour.

If “things are moving fast” is arriving as an explanation for why they haven’t responded, why a timeline slipped, why they can’t quite commit to a next step - it’s not a recruiting update. It’s a holding pattern.

The test: has anything actually changed in how often they contact you? If the answer is no, a useful response is: “I understand things are busy. When would be a good time for us to reconnect?” It requires them to name a next step without putting pressure on the relationship.

The bottom line

These three phrases are just the language category. Coaches also communicate through behavior - how often they reach out, whether they initiate or only respond, what happens to their communication patterns after you visit.

And there are things to watch for on campus visits, in how they talk about money, and in how current players behave around you, that tell you just as much as anything they say directly.

Reading all of it accurately is a skill. The good news is it’s learnable.

These three phrases are from the Language category of the Red Flag Decoder - a searchable database of 32 common patterns in recruiting, covering things coaches say, behaviors to watch for, visit warning signs, financial red flags, and cultural signals. Each entry breaks down what it sounds like, what it usually means, when it’s legitimate, when it’s concerning, and what to do next.

It’s available now for $25. With June 15 approaching, it’s the pattern recognition tool I wish every family had going in.

Get The Red Flag Decoder

At some point in the recruiting process, most families have a version of the same conversation.

A coach says something that sounds encouraging. Maybe even exciting. The family gets off the call feeling good. Then somebody says “wait, what did she actually mean by that?” and nobody has a satisfying answer.

This is one of the most common and least talked-about experiences in recruiting. Not the big dramatic moments - the offer, the commitment, the rejection. The murky middle. The conversations that feel positive but leave you uncertain. The emails that sound warm but don’t actually say anything. The visits where everything looked great and yet something felt slightly off.

Families tend to chalk this up to overthinking. To being too anxious. To not trusting the process.

But what if it was a knowledge gap instead?

The information asymmetry nobody mentions

College coaches recruit every year. They have these conversations hundreds of times. They know exactly what they’re communicating, exactly what they’re not committing to, and exactly how to keep a recruit engaged without making promises they can’t keep.

Your family is doing this once. Maybe twice if you have younger daughters coming up behind.

That gap - between a professional who has navigated this process hundreds of times and a family navigating it for the first time - is enormous. And it shows up most clearly in language.

Here’s the thing though: both sides are being strategic. Coaches are managing multiple recruits simultaneously, protecting their program’s options, and communicating in ways that keep doors open without necessarily opening them fully.

Families are doing the same - projecting more interest in some schools than they feel, playing down offers from others, trying not to show their hand too early. That’s not dishonest. It’s just how a high-stakes process with incomplete information on both sides tends to work.

The difference is that coaches have done this hundreds of times and families are doing it for the first. So when the language gets strategic - when an answer sounds complete but doesn’t actually commit to anything - coaches know exactly what just happened, and families often don’t.

That’s the gap. Not bad faith on either side. Just experience on one side that the other doesn’t have yet.

Why instincts aren’t enough

The problem with relying on gut feeling in recruiting is that the process is specifically designed to make you feel good about programs that may or may not be right for you. Coaches are personable. Visits are curated. Everyone is on their best behavior. The entire environment is optimized for positive impressions.

Your instincts are calibrated for normal human interaction. Recruiting isn’t normal human interaction. It’s a high-stakes professional process dressed up to feel like one.

That doesn’t mean your instincts are useless. When something feels genuinely off - when a visit leaves you unsettled despite looking fine on paper, when a coach’s communication pattern shifts without explanation, when an answer to a direct question somehow doesn’t answer anything - that discomfort is worth paying attention to.

The problem is that instinct without context can’t tell you whether what you’re feeling is a real warning sign or normal recruiting uncertainty. And those two things feel almost identical from the inside.

What you need alongside instinct is pattern recognition. The ability to look at what a coach said or did and understand whether it’s standard practice or something worth flagging. That only comes from experience - either your own, which most families don’t have, or borrowed from someone who does.

What this means in practice

Recruiting conversations are not always casual. Every significant thing a coach says to you is considered. The vague answers to direct questions are usually vague for a reason. The enthusiastic language that stops short of actual commitment is doing a specific job.

None of this is cause for paranoia. Most programs recruiting your daughter are doing so in good faith. But good faith doesn’t mean full transparency, and understanding the difference between the two is one of the most useful things a family can develop during this process.

Next week I’m going to start decoding some of the most common things coaches say - phrases that show up in almost every recruiting conversation, what they usually mean, and how to tell the difference between a legitimate message and a warning sign.

It’s a small window into something I’ve been building for a while, and I think it’ll change how you listen to these conversations. More on that next week!

Want to write better emails to college coaches? I put together 20 templates covering the situations you’ll actually face across two years of recruiting - frameworks that give you the right structure while keeping your own voice. You’ll also get a free 7-day trial of my AI advisor!

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Nobody gets involved in their daughter’s recruiting because they want to make it harder for her.

They get involved because they love her, because the process is stressful, and because when things feel out of control, the natural instinct is to reach for something you can actually do. Send an email. Ask a question. Fill a silence. Push a coach for an answer.

The problem is that recruiting is one of those rare processes where the more visibly you try to help, the more likely you are to quietly hurt it. What coaches are looking for in a recruit - the ability to advocate for herself, to handle pressure, to navigate an unfamiliar situation with composure - is exactly what gets obscured when a parent steps in to manage it for her.

The visit

Campus visits are where this plays out most clearly, and most consequentially.

A coach has invited your daughter to spend time with her program. She wants to see how your daughter carries herself, what questions she asks, how she engages with current players and staff. The visit is, among other things, an extended evaluation. Your daughter knows this. You know this. And yet.

The parent who fills the silence because their daughter seems nervous is doing something completely understandable. If your daughter struggles to talk to adults, if she’s shy, if she’s not handling the pressure of the conversation well - the instinct to compensate is almost automatic. You know her better than anyone in that room. You can see she’s not showing them what she’s capable of. So you help.

What the coach sees is different. She sees a player who can’t lead her own recruiting conversation. Who needs her parent to speak for her. That observation will follow your daughter out of the room.

Read more

Earlier this week, I was out walking with my son when I noticed a house down the street had a new listing sign out front.

I pulled up Zillow before we’d made it to the end of the block.

I looked at the price, thought about what we’re about to list our own house for, and spent the next ten minutes asking myself questions I had no business asking.

What if theirs sells first?

What if ours is priced wrong?

What if buyers who might have wanted our house see theirs and choose it instead?

I know exactly what I was doing. I was comparing. I know how pointless it is - every house is different, every buyer is different, every set of circumstances is different. And I still couldn’t stop myself.

I’m telling you this because I spend a lot of time telling families not to do exactly what I just did.

The comparison trap in recruiting

Recruiting is one of the most comparison-rich environments a teenager can be in.

Commitments go up on Instagram. Your friends get coy if you ask if they’re being recruited by a certain school. Parents talk at tournaments.

A parent whose daughter is a freshman sees a sophomore commit and starts doing math in their head. A junior who hasn’t heard from anyone watches a teammate get three offers in a week and wonders what she’s doing wrong.

None of this information is useful. Most of it is actively misleading. And yet it’s almost impossible to ignore, because the human brain is wired to benchmark. We make sense of where we are by looking at where other people are. It’s just how we’re built.

The problem is that recruiting is one of the worst possible environments for this kind of comparison, because the variables are so numerous and so individual that almost no two processes are meaningfully comparable.

I got a question recently from a parent. They’d heard that timelines for their daughter’s position were typically longer than others. But then they’d seen some data suggesting otherwise, and they wanted to know which was true.

My answer was essentially: it doesn’t matter. Not because the question isn’t understandable - it’s completely understandable - but because knowing the average timeline tells you almost nothing about how your daughter’s process is going to unfold.

Her specific skill set, her academic profile, the positions available at the programs she’s targeting, how many roster spots each coach is trying to fill - none of that is captured in an average. The average is noise. Her process is the signal.

Why “run your own race” doesn’t work on its own

The advice to run your own race has been around forever. I wrote about it before I ever started this newsletter, back when I was just trying to make sense of what I was seeing in recruiting. It’s true advice. Comparison is the thief of joy - the phrase is a cliché because it keeps being right.

But telling someone not to compare is like telling someone not to think about a pink elephant. The instruction produces the opposite effect. You need something to replace the comparison with, not just a directive to stop doing it.

What actually helps, in my experience, is understanding why the comparison is specifically misleading - not just generally unhelpful, but wrong in ways you can point to.

Every recruit is different. Every coach is looking for something different. Every program has different needs in different years. A player who would be an 80% scholarship at one program might be a 20% at another, not because of anything she did or didn’t do, but because of where each program is in its cycle. None of that has anything to do with what someone else is doing.

When you can see clearly why the comparison doesn’t hold, it loses some of its grip.

What you can actually control

This is the bit where I’m supposed to tell you everything is going to work out. I’m not going to do that, because I don’t know if it is, and neither do you, and pretending otherwise doesn’t help anyone.

What I can tell you is that the anxiety you’re feeling - or the anxiety your daughter is feeling - is a completely normal response to a process that is genuinely uncertain, genuinely high-stakes, and genuinely out of your control in most of the ways that matter. The uncertainty is real. The pressure is real. Feeling it doesn’t mean something is wrong.

What it means is that you’re paying attention.

The question is what you do with that attention. Pointed at other people’s timelines and other people’s offers, it just generates noise. Pointed at the things you can actually influence - how she prepares, how she communicates with coaches, how she performs when it matters - it becomes something useful.

June 15 is six weeks away. The next few months are going to feel increasingly loud with commitments and announcements and other people’s news. You don’t have to mute it. You just have to remember it’s not about you.

Run your own race. I know that’s easier said than done. Run it anyway.

Want to write better emails to college coaches? I put together 20 templates covering the situations you’ll actually face across two years of recruiting - frameworks that give you the right structure while keeping your own voice. You’ll also get a free 7-day trial of my AI advisor!

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A few years ago, a player traveled halfway across the country to compete at the Regional Club Championships.

She was already committed, and her college coaches were there to recruit, so they also made sure to watch her games to see how she was progressing.

They wanted to see her in a high-pressure environment, watch how she prepared, how she competed, how she carried herself with her teammates.

She barely got on the field.

They sat at the side of the field for most of the day watching her sit on the bench. And then, before the tournament was over, she left. Packed her bag and walked out on her team mid-event.

It’s easy to want to feel sorry for a player in this situation. They’ve put in the work, attended the same trainings, paid the same fees, and traveled the same distance. The playing time decision wasn’t hers to make.

But RCC is a performance environment. Just like college. So her coaches wondered: what happens if she doesn’t play in college?

That’s ultimately how it played out. A few minutes here and there, but she could never quite establish herself. She transferred before her junior year.

Like those coaches, I’ve seen a version of this story play out more than once.

What coaches are actually doing at these tournaments

RCC and NCC are high-pressure tournaments. The best clubs, the best players, high stakes. College coaches show up specifically to watch players they’re recruiting or players they’ve already committed.

What they don’t control is the lineup.

There’s no doubt that it’s frustrating as a college coach when the player you’re there to see for a given game doesn’t see the field. It’s a fairly common experience though, and when it happens, the coach isn’t necessarily leaving. She’s watching something different than she planned.

She came to evaluate a player’s skill. Now she’s evaluating a player’s character.

What good looks like from the sideline

Coaches notice the player who stays locked in even when she’s not playing. Who tracks the game, talks to her teammates, celebrates the goals, stays physically and mentally present on the bench. Who looks like she belongs even when she’s not on the field.

That player is telling a college coach something important: she knows how to handle adversity. She understands that her job doesn’t start and end with her own playing time. She can separate her frustration from her behavior.

These are not small things at the college level. Rosters carry more players than ever. Playing time is not guaranteed. Depth players matter. The culture of a program is built as much on the bench as it is on the field.

What kills you

The obvious things - sulking, body language, disengagement, checking a phone (yes, this happens more than you'd think) are noticed immediately.

But there are subtler versions that coaches log too when they spot them. The player who stops communicating with teammates. The one who goes through the physical motions of being present but has clearly checked out mentally; it’s written all over their face. The one who leaves early.

None of these are necessarily disqualifying in isolation. Coaches understand frustration. They’ve felt it themselves. But they’re also building a picture of how a player responds when things don’t go her way - because things won’t always go her way in college either.

The part nobody wants to say out loud

Here’s the uncomfortable truth underneath all of this: sometimes you simply don’t play, and it isn’t fair, and the decision wasn’t yours to make.

Club coaches set lineups for their own reasons - winning, development priorities, rotation philosophy, internal politics. A college coach watching from the stands has no control over any of that.

But she’s still watching.

And the player who understands that - who competes for her team even when her team isn’t competing for her playing time - is the one who doesn’t give a college coach a reason to start asking questions.

RCC and NCC are a few weeks away. If you’ve been selected for a roster, it’s no guarantee you get on the field. And you should know that recruitment doesn’t pause when you’re on the bench. In some ways, it’s only just beginning.

Want to write better emails to college coaches? I put together 20 templates covering the situations you’ll actually face across two years of recruiting - frameworks that give you the right structure while keeping your own voice. You’ll also get a free 7-day trial of my AI advisor!

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Two offers arrived in the same week.

School A: 40% scholarship. School B: 25% scholarship.

Most families look at those numbers and move quickly. School A is the better offer. Done.

Except School A has a cost of attendance of $60,000. School B’s is $90,000.

School A’s 40% is worth $24,000 a year. School B’s 25% is worth $22,500. They’re almost identical — and once you factor in that School B has a stronger academic merit aid program your daughter qualifies for, School B might actually cost your family less out of pocket.

What cost of attendance actually means

Every school publishes a Cost of Attendance figure - the total estimated annual cost of being a student there, covering tuition, room and board, books, fees, and personal expenses.

This is the number an athletic scholarship percentage is calculated against, and it varies enormously. A mid-major public university might have a COA of $35,000. A private school in a major city could be $85,000 or more.

That gap matters more than almost anything else when you’re comparing offers.

A 50% offer at a $40,000 school is $20,000 a year. A 30% offer at an $80,000 school is $24,000. When families don’t convert percentages into dollars first, they make decisions based on a number that tells them almost nothing useful.

A higher scholarship dollar amount doesn't automatically mean a better deal. A 30% offer at an $80,000 school is more money than a 30% offer at a $40,000 school — but the family at the expensive school is still paying more out of pocket unless the rest of their package closes the gap.

That's why net cost is the only number worth comparing. Two families can receive identical scholarship percentages and end up in completely different financial situations depending on where they're going.

The psychology of the bigger number

There’s something else worth naming, even though nobody talks about it.

When a coach offers 40%, it feels like more. Not just financially - it feels like a stronger statement of belief. Like they want your daughter more. The family that receives 25% can know intellectually that the net cost works out better, and still feel like they’re somehow settling.

That feeling is real, and it’s worth acknowledging rather than pretending the math is enough to override it. Scholarship percentage has become a proxy for how much a program values your daughter as a player - and when families choose to think about it that way, higher is always better regardless of what the number actually represents in dollars.

The problem is that the percentage reflects two things simultaneously: how much a coach values you, and how much their budget is already committed elsewhere.

A coach at a top program competing for championships might offer 20% and mean it as genuine praise. A coach at a program that’s in a rebuild might offer the same player 70% because they would have higher on-field value to them.

Every coach thinks about scholarship differently, and adapts their recruiting strategy to suit; I plan to cover this in more detail in a future newsletter.

Either way, because you can’t know their philosophy, budget, or how they’re choosing to spend it across a class or a roster, the best bet is to pay attention to what the scholarship percentage number does tell you.

When converted to actual dollars and set against the full financial picture, it tells you what you’re going to pay. That’s the number that matters four years from now.

Read more

Most families trying to play in D1 or D2 hear a scholarship number and spend the next week trying to figure out if they can make it work.

That’s the wrong starting point. The number you’ve been given isn’t the number that matters. What matters is what you’ll actually pay - and those two things are often very different.

Three pools of money

College coaches in equivalency sports - which field hockey is - don’t have unlimited money. They have a scholarship budget, and they have to build the best possible roster with it. Every dollar they commit to one player is a dollar they can’t give to another.

What most families don’t realize is that there are three separate pools of money available to a college athlete, and they work very differently.

Athletic aid comes directly from the coach’s budget. This is the percentage number they mention - 25%, 40%, whatever it is. It’s pulled from a fixed pool the athletic department controls, and it has to stretch across the entire roster.

Academic merit aid comes from the institution - the admissions or financial aid office, not the athletic department. If your daughter qualifies for this based on her GPA and test scores, that money typically doesn’t cost the coach anything. It exists independently of whatever athletic offer is on the table.

Need-based aid works similarly. It flows from the institution or federal government based on your family’s financial situation, largely driven by what you submit on the FAFSA. Again, it generally doesn’t touch the coach’s athletic budget.

Whether these sources can be combined - and how - varies by school. There’s no universal rule. Some schools stack them freely. Others have limits. Asking each school directly what’s available for someone with your daughter’s academic profile is one of the most important financial conversations you can have.

One more thing worth knowing before we get into how coaches think about this. The House settlement - the landmark legal case that reshaped college athletics in 2025 - increased the maximum number of scholarships available in D1 field hockey from 12 to 27.

Most families saw that headline and assumed it meant more money flowing into the sport. The reality is more complicated. A handful of programs increased. Many others stayed flat or quietly reduced, as institutional resources shifted toward revenue-sharing obligations in football and basketball.

And with rosters now potentially carrying up to 27 players, some coaches are spreading the same budget - or less - across more athletes than before. Nobody publishes their numbers. You won't find this information on any athletic department website, and most coaches won't volunteer it.

What you can control is how well you understand the other two pools of money available to you - because whether a program's athletic budget went up, down, or sideways, the academic merit and need-based aid picture is yours to explore regardless. A modest athletic offer from a program that's stretched thin looks very different once you know what else might be available to stack on top of it.

What this looks like from the coach’s side

A recruit who qualifies for $15,000 in academic merit aid is, in a practical sense, $15,000 cheaper to recruit than one who doesn’t.

The coach can offer less athletic money and still put together a package that makes the school affordable. Or they can offer the same athletic money and the family ends up with a significantly better deal. Either way, the coach’s budget goes further.

I’ve watched this calculation happen in real time. When a recruit has a strong academic profile, it genuinely shifts what a coach thinks they can offer. Not because they value her more as a player - but because she’s easier to fit into the budget.

For any offer short of a full ride - which is most of them in field hockey - the coach will typically point you toward academic and need-based aid as part of building the full picture. That’s not a signal of anything other than how the system works. The athletic number and the institutional aid number are separate conversations with separate parts of the university, and a good coach will help you navigate both.

What to do with this

If you are a strong student, that’s not a fallback talking point for when recruiting doesn’t go the way you hoped. It’s a financial asset - to the coach building a roster on a budget, and to your family trying to make the numbers work.

That’s why you mention your GPA in your emails, on your profiles, your website - anywhere a coach might look before starting to recruit you.

And when offers arrive, ask each school the same question: what other aid might be available to someone with your academic profile? Many families never ask. The ones who do often find the picture looks very different than the headline number suggested, and that they have more room to negotiate than they thought.

In Thursday’s newsletter, I’ll outline how to actually compare what you’ve been offered across schools, and why the percentage is usually the least useful number in that conversation.

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Want to write better emails to college coaches? I put together 20 templates covering the situations you’ll actually face across two years of recruiting - frameworks that give you the right structure while keeping your own voice. You’ll also get a free 7-day trial of my AI advisor!

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Most recruiting emails fail the 30-second test.

Not because the player is untalented. Not because the email is badly written. Because it sounds exactly like the 40 other emails that coach received this week.

Same opening. Same bio dump. Same “I love your school’s balance of academics and athletics.”

We see the font change where you swapped in our name. We notice when the coach name and the school name don’t match. We can tell when you wrote to everyone, which means you wrote to no one.

The emails we remember are different. They show us you actually watched our games. They sound like a real person, not a recruiting robot. They include the right information in the right order so we can get everything we need in 30 seconds.

I built a system for writing those emails.

It’s called the 6-Part Email Framework, and it’s the backbone of my new toolkit: Emails Coaches Actually Read.

Here’s what’s inside:

The 6-Part Email Framework — the structure that works for almost every recruiting situation, from first contact to handling an offer.

20 situation-specific templates — including the moments families feel most stuck:

• Handling Silence / Lack of Response

• Asking About Financial Aid / Scholarship

• Final Push / Last Chance

• Respectfully Declining Offer

• After Receiving Offer

• Injury / Setback Update

...and 14 more covering everything from first contact to summer training updates, all in an easy-to-access Notion database:

These aren’t scripts. If you copy-paste them, your emails will sound like everyone else who bought this product. They’re frameworks - they show you the structure, the key elements, the flow. You still have to sound like yourself.

That’s the whole point. Authenticity beats polish every time.

Get Emails Coaches Actually Read for $25

Rory McIlroy led the 2026 Masters by 6 strokes after 36 holes last Friday evening - the biggest margin in 90 years of tournament history at the halfway mark.

Then came Day 3: three bogeys, a double bogey, his entire lead erased. He entered the final round tied for first.

Day 4 started worse. More erratic play. By hole 6, McIlroy was multiple shots back.

Everyone has a version of this in recruiting.

You sent 50 emails. Zero responses.

You played well at a showcase. The coaches who said they’d watch didn’t show.

Your top school went quiet after months of consistent contact.

You watch Instagram as teammates commit to schools you thought were recruiting you.

The question isn’t whether recruiting will go sideways. It’s what you do when it does.

Stop the descent

As Brad Stulberg wrote, McIlroy’s demeanour stayed remarkably consistent through the ups and downs of his Masters weekend:

Throughout McIlroy’s collapse and recovery, one thing remained constant: No thrown clubs. No screaming or shouting. No poor body language. Just a relentless focus on the next shot - whether it was from the sand, wood chips, gallery, behind a tree, or whatever other predicament he found himself in. He hung in there. He stopped the descent. He prevented his bad holes from becoming awful holes.

What most families do when recruiting goes quiet:

• Panic-email new schools they haven’t researched

• Lower their target list overnight

• Abandon the process that got them this far

• Convince themselves they’re not good enough

This is outcome thinking. When the outcome isn’t happening, you spiral.

Don’t let a quiet month become a lost year.

The same weekend, 600 miles away, Wout van Aert won Paris-Roubaix - one of cycling’s most brutal one-day races - after years of near-misses and setbacks.

The interviewer said: “You never stopped believing.”

Van Aert corrected him: “I did, I did stop believing. But then the next day I woke up and fought for it again.”

That’s the point.

You don’t have to be positive all the time. You don’t have to pretend setbacks don’t hurt.

But you do have to show up the next day and do the work anyway.

Process over prize

Throughout the final round, McIlroy kept pulling himself back to a simple mantra: “Process over prize.”

Not “I need to win.” Not “I can’t let this slip away.” Just focus on the next shot.

Here’s why that works: When you fixate on outcomes you can’t control - winning, getting offers, where you’ll commit - your brain treats it as a threat. You get anxious. You second-guess. You tighten up.

When you focus on what you can control - your next email, your next conversation, your next training session - your brain treats it as a challenge. You stay present. You stay engaged.

The difference shows up in performance. Research consistently finds that outcome-focused athletes experience more anxiety and perform worse under pressure. Process-focused athletes stay calmer and execute better when it matters.

But here’s the catch: You can’t just call upon a process mindset when recruiting goes sideways and expect it to work.

McIlroy didn’t develop that mantra on the back nine at Augusta. It’s been his practice for years. When things were going well, when things were falling apart, same focus: the process.

It famously took years for him to get the desired outcome; he blew a four-shot lead at the Masters in 2011, and lost while playing in the final group in 2018. He only got over the line in 2025, but now he’s one of just four back-to-back winners ever.

The families who weather recruiting adversity are the ones who’ve been doing the work all along. They communicate consistently, not just when panicking. They develop skills year-round, not just before showcases. They build relationships, not just send transactional emails when they need something.

What process actually means in recruiting

It’s not “stay positive” or “trust the journey” or “it’ll work out.” Those are platitudes, not process.

Process is sending one well-researched email per month to schools on your target list. Having one conversation with your club coach about feedback from coaches. Working on one technical weakness coaches have identified. Watching film of one game with a notepad and some intention.

Small actions. Repeated. Regardless of immediate results.

You can’t control whether coaches respond. You can’t control who enters the transfer portal. You can’t control when a program has budget or roster spots. Sometimes you do everything right, and the outcome still doesn’t go your way.

All you can control is your process. How you show up in the next moment. The next action you take.

The bottom line

Van Aert stopped believing. Then woke up and fought for it again. McIlroy focused on the next shot, not the prize.

Both won. Not because adversity didn’t hit them. Because they knew what to do when it did.

The process doesn’t guarantee the outcome. But it gives you the best shot at it.

When recruiting is going well, focus on the process. When recruiting isn’t going well, focus on the process.

One part of the process that families consistently get wrong is communication. Not because they don't try - because they don't know what to say, or when, or how to say it without sounding like every other recruit in a coach's inbox. I put together 20 templates covering the situations you'll actually face across two years of recruiting - frameworks that give you the right structure while keeping your own voice.

Get Emails Coaches Actually Read for $25

Want more help? I built an AI agent trained on all my writing and knowledge that can answer your recruiting questions 24/7 — with a 7-day free trial

Try The Recruiting Advisor for free

June 15 hits, and in between calls with college coaches, you check Instagram.

There it is. A commitment announcement.

A player you competed against at tournaments. A player whose recruiting timeline seemed identical to yours just days ago.

And suddenly you’re wondering: How did this happen so fast? Did I miss something? Am I already behind?

Welcome to the most anxiety-inducing day in field hockey recruiting.

But here’s what most families don’t understand: those early commitments aren’t magic. They’re not cheating. And they’re definitely not the standard everyone else should be measuring themselves against.

They’re the result of a very specific set of circumstances that almost never applies to you.

Let me show you exactly how early commitments happen - and why you shouldn’t try to replicate them.

The dream school alignment

Every early commitment starts with the same foundation: mutual alignment that happens to exist before June 15 even arrives.

The player has a clear #1 school. Not “top three” or “really like them” - a genuine dream school where everything fits. The academics. The location. The coaching style. The team culture.

And that school? They have that player as a top recruiting target. Not “on our list” or “we’re interested” - they want her specifically, and they’ve known it for months.

This alignment is rare.

Most recruiting takes time precisely because this alignment doesn’t exist naturally. You need conversations to figure out if it’s there. You need visits to test whether what you think you want actually matches reality. You need offers from multiple programs to compare options.

But when alignment exists from day one, the process looks completely different. And you can’t manufacture it.

The relationship foundation

Here’s what the outside world doesn’t see: these “instant” commitments aren’t instant at all.

The player spent the last few summers at camps on that campus. She’s been coached by the staff multiple times. She knows what practice feels like under that coach. She’s met the current players. She’s eaten in the dining hall. She’s walked through the academic buildings and stayed in the dorms.

By the time June 15 arrives, she’s already experienced everything that other recruits are still trying to figure out through the recruiting process.

The official recruiting conversations couldn’t happen until now because of NCAA rules. But the relationship building? That started years ago.

So when June 15 hits and the coach finally gets to say “We want you here” - there’s no hesitation. Because the player already knows exactly what she’d be signing up for.

The recruiting process didn’t get accelerated. It just happened through a different channel.

The offer timing

When coaches call their number one recruit on June 15, that first conversation doesn’t always start with “We’d love to get to know you better.”

It starts with: “You’re our top recruit. Let me walk you through exactly what we can offer you.”

The coach lays out the full picture on that call. Here’s the scholarship breakdown. Here’s where we hope you’ll fit in the lineup. Here’s what we see for your development. Here’s the timeline we’re working with.

Most programs don’t operate this way with most recruits. Most coaches want multiple conversations over weeks or months. They want to see you at more events. They want you on campus for a visit. They want time to evaluate whether you’re the right fit.

And most families don’t want to make such a quick decision either. They need time to process information. They want to compare multiple programs. They want their daughter to experience different campus cultures before committing. The idea of deciding in a day feels reckless rather than decisive.

But for a program’s absolute number one target? Sometimes they skip straight to the full pitch on day one.

Because here’s the calculation: if they wait to go through a traditional recruiting process, they might lose her to another school. And they don’t want to compete for her - they want to lock her in.

So they compress what would normally be a months-long conversation into a single phone call.

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I’ve been in England for the past week with the USA U18 Women’s National Team - I’m writing this from the airport in London.

Twenty of the best field hockey players in the country. Current and future D1 recruits. Many will play for top programs.

And most of the players on this roster play the exact same position for their high school team.

Attacking central midfielder.

The star role. The playmaker. The one who touches the ball most and gets the stats that fill recruiting profiles.

We joked as coaches that on some high school teams, this player is asked to take the 16s, move the ball upfield, and put the ball in the goal.

On tour, players used to being a central midfielder had to learn how to play out wide. Some ended up doing minutes up front or in defense.

That positional flexibility had to develop fast for players who’d spent years perfecting one role.

It reminded me of something I learned the hard way 15 years ago.

The position I thought I’d play

I was a center back my entire, undistinguished field hockey career.

That’s what I was relatively good at. That’s what I’d trained for. That’s the role I understood.

When I finally broke into the first team at my club, I thought I knew how it would go. I’d compete for a spot in the back line. Maybe start on the bench, work my way up, and eventually earn my place.

Then the coach pulled me aside.

“You’re not going to play center back here. The guys ahead of you are better, and that’s not changing anytime soon.”

I started to process what that meant - probably sitting on the bench, maybe getting garbage minutes late in games we’d already won or lost.

Then he said: “But you could do a job for us as a forward.”

I thought he was joking.

I wasn’t a goalscorer. I couldn’t eliminate defenders one-on-one. I didn’t have the technical ability that the talented attacking players had.

But he didn’t need me to do any of that.

What the team actually needed

Here’s what the coach saw that I didn’t:

Our most talented attacking players were flaky. Brilliant on their day, but inconsistent. They’d drift out of games. Stop working when things got hard. Play as individuals instead of as a team.

What we needed up front wasn’t another goalscorer. We had those.

We needed someone who would organize the more talented players in the press and bring them into the game. Someone who would do the unglamorous work that created space for others to shine.

My job wasn’t to score goals. It was to make the team function.

So I learned to play forward. Not the way a natural striker plays - I was never going to be that player. But in a way that solved the specific problem this team had.

When generalization beats specialization

A coach’s job is to make the decision that’s in the best interests of the team. Not necessarily the one that’s in your best interests, or their own.

So you might arrive in college as an attacking center mid, but find yourself asked to play right back. Or left forward.

It happens more often than you think. I had a player in college who was a forward by trade, but was quite far down the depth chart in what was the team’s strongest line.

When a long-term injury opened up a slot at half-back, we sounded her out. Initially, she was reticent. She’d built her entire identity around being a forward. That’s what college coaches had recruited her for.

The first few weeks were rough. Different spacing. Different timing. Different responsibilities. She was learning a position she’d never played.

But something shifted. She worked hard on the biggest holes in her game for that role - her long passing and individual defense. She could already eliminate in tight spaces, so being up against the sideline wasn’t an issue.

Having spent her first two years on the bench getting minimal to zero minutes, she started at right back for what was then the program’s most successful season to date.

The key was her willingness to embrace a new role and the discomfort that comes with it - just like some of the USA U18 girls had to do this week.

Your value to a program isn’t determined by how good you are at one position. It’s determined by how many problems you can solve.

Injuries happen. Tactics shift. Matchups demand adjustments. The difference between those who get into the lineup and those who don’t might not be talent - it could be mindset. Some players see positional flexibility as an opportunity; others see it as a threat to their identity.

Why youth sport creates this problem

Club coaches and high school coaches also want to win games. So they put their best players in positions where they can have the most impact. The talented center midfielder stays at center midfielder. The skilled forward stays at forward.

Nobody’s rotating the star player out wide or asking her to learn defense. Why would they? She’s dominating where she is.

And families see their daughter scoring goals or running the midfield, and think: “This is her position. This is what will get her recruited.”

So by the time players reach national team camps or college recruiting, they’ve spent years perfecting one role.

But when college coaches are evaluating, they’re also wondering: Can you adapt? Can you learn? Can you make yourself useful when Plan A doesn’t work?

What you can do about it

Ask your club coach if you can train in different positions during practice. Not in games if they need you in your primary role. But in training, push yourself to learn different lines.

Because when you get to college, the coach who recruited you as a midfielder might need you at forward. The system might change. The starter ahead of you might be better than expected.

And if your response is “that’s not my position,” you’re going to lose playing time to someone who says “I’ll figure it out.”

When roster decisions get made - when coaches are choosing between two equally talented players - the question isn’t “Who’s better at this one position?”

It’s “Who can do what’s needed to help the team win?”

On the USA U18 team, a couple of center midfielders played on the outside; another played as a forward. A player who was an attacking center midfielder two years ago played left and right back.

It’s not about being mediocre at everything. It’s about being excellent at your primary position while staying capable everywhere else.

Stop optimizing yourself for one position. Start making yourself irreplaceable.

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