Tuesday’s piece was about why families freeze when a recruiting trail goes cold. Today’s is about what to do about it.

There’s a difference between knowing you should reach out, and knowing what to say when you do. The email that restarts a cold trail isn’t particularly complicated, but it does need to do a few specific things.

Hold the line or force the issue

Before you write anything, there’s a decision to make.

Some trails go cold for a reason you already know. The coach told you she’s waiting to see you play again, or they are waiting to see how other recruits that are higher up their list pan out.

There was a clear reason for the pause, even if nothing was put in writing (or you didn’t agree with the premise). In those cases, a pushy email asking where you stand probably won’t help. You’re better off holding the line, sending periodic updates, and letting the situation develop.

Other trails go cold for reasons that are trickier to identify. There was genuine interest around June 15, a few calls and texts, plenty of excitement and hopeful feelings.

And then… silence.

No explanation, no change in circumstances you’re aware of. Or perhaps they said they’d circle back in a month, but six weeks have passed.

That’s when forcing the issue makes more sense - asking directly for a real answer, because ambiguity doesn’t serve either side.

The test is simple: if the coach gave you a reason for going quiet, hold the line until that timeline unfolds, or if something major changes at your end. If the silence has no explanation, ask for one.

Read more

As of today, monthly subscriptions to The Recruiting Roadmap move from $6 to $8. If you are a current monthly subscriber, you’ll see this reflected when your subscription next renews.

The annual subscription stays exactly where it’s been: $60 a year.

That means annual is now 38% cheaper than paying monthly. If you’re on a monthly subscription, switching to annual locks in the lower rate.

Paid subscribers are also getting a new perk: a live Q&A once a month, on top of the two deep dives you already get. The first of these is coming next week, and will be housed within the subscriber chat feature of the Substack app.

Introducing: The Inside Track

Since starting to write this newsletter a couple of years ago, I’ve also built numerous digital products along the way. I’ve consolidated them under one roof, utilizing Substack’s founder membership tier.

The Inside Track includes all the paid subscriber benefits, along with these three products:

The Recruiting Advisor

Your 24/7 AI recruiting advisor, trained on my methodology. Use it to decode coach communication, draft emails, prepare for calls and visits, and work through anything the process throws at you. I’ll share some examples of how it has helped people next week.

Emails Coaches Actually Read

The complete toolkit for writing emails that get noticed. 20 templates, every framework, every example - organized so you can find what you need when you need it.

The Red Flag Decoder

Know what you’re walking into before you commit. Every red flag pattern I’ve seen across years of coaching and consulting, explained and decoded so you can evaluate programs honestly.

The Resilient Athlete

Mental conditioning exercises built for teenage players - handling pressure, standards versus scoreboard thinking, navigating parental conflict, and more.

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Thanks again for reading!
Alan

Somewhere on your list right now, there’s a school you haven’t emailed in a while.

Maybe the coach went quiet after a promising start. Maybe you let the communication drift while you were focused on other programs. Maybe you hoped they’d reach out on June 15 and they didn’t, and now it feels too late and too awkward to try again.

So you haven’t. And the longer you don’t, the harder it feels to start.

The two things that stop families

The first is pride. If a program hasn’t been in consistent contact, or went quiet after some early interest, reaching back out feels like admitting you’re not among their top targets.

A lot of well-intentioned recruiting advice says to “go where you’re wanted” - which is intended to stop people only chasing dream schools that will never love them back. But it’s trickier when it’s a school you’ve already been in contact with, or think you have a genuine shot at, but things haven’t progressed.

The second is fear. By the time a recruit is considering restarting a cold trail, she’s probably already been rejected or ghosted by multiple programs. Putting herself out there again means risking the same thing happening again. It’s not irrational, it’s the accumulation of a process that asks you to absorb disappointment and keep trying anyway.

Both of these are normal human responses in my eyes, and feeling them doesn’t make you crazy or wrong.

But that doesn’t mean either of them should stop you.

The story you’re telling yourself

One of the pieces of advice I most regularly give to athletes in a whole variety of challenging situations is to “talk to yourself, don’t listen to yourself”.

Listening to yourself is when that weak voice we all have in our head starts to get your attention and dominate your thought process. It says things like:

• “They don’t want me”

• “I’ll just seem desperate”

• “What’s the point?”

That voice is going to find eight different reasons not to send the email.

Talking to yourself is something different. It’s when you acknowledge the discomfort - yes, this is awkward, yes, this might not work - and then decide to act anyway, because the alternative is just leaving a door unopened that might not have been closed.

There are endless reasons a recruiting trail might have gone cold, especially at this time of year.

The coach that was prompt and engaged with communication earlier in the summer might now be drowning in the demands of the fall season.

The party responsible for making the next step might have been unclear after the last contact, and both sides are waiting on the other.

Things might have progressed faster with other recruits, so their communication with you dropped off.

You might have been mostly talking to an assistant coach who hasn’t done a good enough job of advocating for you with their boss.

Their roster math might have changed.

It’s easy to end up going around in circles about why it might be - it happens on almost every consulting call I do. In the absence of information, there is speculation.

I generally keep coming back to the same advice - we could keep trying to figure out why, or we could just make them say no. Write the email. Get to their clinic. Get in front of them.

That’s the reframe. Not “why haven’t they reached out?” but “have we actually made it impossible for them to ignore us?”

What this costs you

The frustration of a recruiting process that hasn’t gone the way you hoped and is stalled out is fair.

The time, the tournaments, the investment of energy and money… of course you feel like it should have produced more by now.

But here’s the thing about the email you haven’t sent: it will take you ten minutes or less to write. The cost of trying - of restarting a trail that went cold, of following up on a school that went quiet, of asking directly whether there’s still a conversation to be had - is almost zero.

The cost of not trying is a door you never find out was open.

The worst that happens is you get a no. This is actually useful information, because it closes the door cleanly and lets you focus somewhere else.

The best that happens is a conversation restarts.

Either outcome is better than the ambiguity you’re sitting in right now.

And If they ghost you again after a direct question like this, and you get no response at all, there’s a signal in that too - it’s certainly time to move on.

The only thing left to do

If there’s a school on your list you haven’t contacted in a while - one you’re still genuinely interested in - the question isn’t whether to reach out. It’s what to say.

Thursday’s paid issue will give you exactly that: how to restart a cold trail, how to freshen your approach with something specific and current, and what the email actually looks like when you write it well.

For now: don’t listen to the voice. Talk back to it.

My Strategy Sessions are back - one hour, three topics of your choosing, direct help with your recruiting process, or anything else in your hockey life that you might need a second set of eyes for. Book via the link below or email hi@alangood.com for more details!

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Coming from Ireland - where self-promotion means being accused of “having notions about yourself” - I always found the pageantry surrounding sports events in the USA somewhat surreal.

For one, the playing of the national anthem before sporting events that don’t involve the national team was not the norm where I grew up. But hey, the original idea was to bring people together and boost post-World War II morale, and it does no harm, so I can get behind that.

But the American pre-game tradition of taking ten minutes to announce the starting lineups with a walk-out, and each player stepping forward… that one I would gladly consign to the sporting dustbin.

You’ve heard of lifemaxxing, but this is lineupmaxxing, especially in the NCAA.

The announcer gets more excited about this moment than when goals are actually scored.

The player steps forward and does her signature wave / move / bow / hand gesture to the crowd. At the same time, the other signature move she recorded on media day (Bow and arrow? Funny hat? Brushing the shoulders? Juggling? Take your bets, people!) plays on the big screen.

The starters get their moment, their teammates clap and cheer (potentially through gritted teeth) and then the game finally begins.

I realize how Grinchesque I sound here, but for me, the entertainment portion of sports should come from the action on the field, not the pregame preamble.

If you’re gonna do it, do it like the Big East Championships, where they briefly announce each player irrespective of whether they’re starting, coming off the bench, or not playing at all.

And because we put so much ceremony around the starting lineup, it’s also become something families attach way too much meaning to.

The game has changed

Field hockey has had unlimited substitutions since 1992, but the introduction of the autopass rule in 2009 and the move from halves to quarters in 2014 has vastly increased the tempo and pace of the game.

It took a while for the NCAA to adopt quarters (2019), and high school a year later, but the end result has been the same - the game has got faster, and players and coaches have had to adapt.

Substitution charts are planned meticulously for each game. Some international teams run their first round of changes after three minutes. Coaches are now more concerned with who is on the pitch at the end of a quarter than the beginning of it. And it’s a constant battle to ensure you have enough speciality players for both your attacking and defensive penalty corner units on the pitch at all times too.

In that environment, who starts a game is a much less meaningful question than it used to be.

Rugby figured this out before field hockey did. They’ve been referring to bench players as “finishers” for over a decade now - not because it sounds nicer, but because it’s accurate.

A player selected to come on with 20 minutes left against legs that have been running for 60 is making a specific tactical contribution. They might have an outsize impact on the result precisely because they aren’t tired.

Field hockey is heading in the same direction, although the NCAA is still caught between the old and the new.

How the bench can matter just as much

Many college teams still overplay their best players. The logic is straightforward: 80% of a star player is worth more than 100% of someone with less ability, especially in a program lacking talent depth.

The typical pattern is a starter going out for six or seven minutes, coming off for a quick break for two minutes, then going back on for the final stretch of the quarter. It works well enough, but it creates a mid-quarter window - usually when the best players on both sides are briefly off the field - that a smart bench player can exploit.

And some programs, especially those who now have more scholarship resources in the NIL era, have started thinking about this more systematically.

GPS and heart rate data can tell you exactly when a player’s output is declining, which changes how you think about rotation. A handful of teams are experimenting with ice hockey-style line changes - swapping entire forward lines at regular intervals to keep physical intensity high throughout.

The idea is that they can wear teams down over time, and take advantage in the final quarter when opposition defenders who have had minimal rest are flagging, while these forwards who’ve only been on the field for half as much time are still fresh.

Not every team is doing it to that extent yet, but more and more teams are getting creative with their bench use - using more players, for shorter stints, as the game speeds up.

What this means for recruiting

Here’s where families sometimes get anxious: if my daughter isn’t starting, will coaches who come to watch think less of her?

The honest answer is that you do need to get on the pitch at some stage to be seen (although your bench behavior is also being watched).

But a player who comes on against fatigued starters and makes an immediate impact - a clean tackle, a sharp pass, a pressing line that forces a turnover - is showing a coach something real. Possibly more real than a starter who may have been coasting through the opening exchanges, or just conserving energy.

Coaches who recruit seriously are watching for impact, not counting minutes. What you do with the time you get tells them far more about what you’d bring to their program than the number on the clock when you came on.

If Friday’s paid piece on deselection landed for you, this is the other side of that conversation. In a game that’s gotten faster, more tactical, and more physiologically sophisticated, impact off the bench matters more than ever.

The starting lineup gets the walkout, but the substitution chart wins the game.

My Strategy Sessions are back - one hour, three topics of your choosing, direct help with your recruiting process, or anything else in your hockey life that you might need a second set of eyes for. Book via the link below or email hi@alangood.com for more details!

Book a Strategy Session

Fall season is underway, which means rosters are being finalized. That could mean some high school players make varsity, or some stay on JV. In college, it might mean hearing that you’re not among the 16-18 players your coach plans to use in games this season.

For some players, that means having a conversation they were hoping to avoid, and one that’s no fun to be a part of.

They didn’t make the cut. Or they’re not starting. Or they’re getting less time than they thought they would.

What happens next - and how you, as a parent, respond to it - is what today’s piece is about.

Why the decision probably isn’t what you think it is

When a player doesn’t get selected, the instinct is to look for a reason that centers on her. What did she do wrong? What can she do better? What is the coach seeing that we’re not?

Sometimes it’s that, but it’s often more complicated.

A coach’s job is to make the decision that’s in the best interest of the team. Not the individual, not themselves. The team. And that means they’re weighing dozens of other factors that have nothing to do with your daughter’s talent.

Can she be trusted to execute the game plan? Does she understand the pressing structure, where the team is forcing the opponent, where they want to try to recover the ball, and what her specific role requires? A forward who scores goals but doesn’t do her job in the press becomes a liability at certain levels of the game, regardless of what she contributes in the circle.

Does she bring her specific strength at a high enough level to be relied upon? If a midfielder’s super strength is posting up to receive facing her own goal under pressure and progressing play upfield, but she’s getting turned over doing it, that strength stops being an asset.

Then there’s the puzzle piece problem. Field hockey at higher levels involves substitution charts, set-piece considerations, and physical rotation plans. A player who might be in the top 16 on pure talent can lose out to someone slightly less skilled who fills a different gap. She could be the only reliable injector on penalty corners, or the best first runner on the defensive PC unit, or maybe she maintains her physical output into the later minutes when others are fading.

And underpinning all of this is the training environment, and how players are showing up there daily. If your kid isn’t playing, it’s easy to imagine how good she might be, but the coach is seeing whether that’s actually true every day at practice.

I once had a parent who moaned incessantly about how his kid deserved to play, so I invited him to watch 20 minutes of practice and put himself in the selector’s shoes. After 15 minutes he shook my hand, apologized for wasting my time, and left.

Read more

A few years ago, I was working with the USA U16 WNT when one of the other assistant coaches, Scott Tupper, gave a presentation to the team that has stuck with me ever since.

He put up pictures of famous athletes and asked the room who they were. LeBeon James, Caitlin Clark, Serena Williams, and so on. Every hand went up, every time. Then he put up a picture of Xan de Waard.

One hand went up.

De Waard is the reigning FIH World Player of the Year, an award she’s won twice. She’s earned over 250 caps and won two Olympics golds, three World Cups and four European Championships. And in a room full of players who wanted to play field hockey at “the next level”, almost nobody knew her name.

That’s not a criticism, but it is a diagnosis.

Looking but not seeing

American players are, thankfully, watching more field hockey than ever.

The never-ending scroll of social media ensures that. Colleges have become much better at sharing their best goals and moments, and we just had two solid weeks of brilliant skill and controversial umpiring decisions filling our feeds from the FIH World Cup in Belgium and the Netherlands.

There’s a much better chance now than there was a decade ago that a young US player not only sees this incredible Ashley Sessa individual goal, for example, but also knows who scored it. Something is better than nothing, and that exposure matters for the sport.

But there’s a difference between consuming field hockey and actually watching it. The clips show you the moments, but they don’t necessarily show you what goes into creating them.

The glass ceiling

I used to coach a player who was one of the all-time leading goalscorers in her state - more than 100 strikes in her high school career. Yet she had trouble with basic grip changes from forehand to backhand, often resulting in intercepts and hits with the back of her stick.

This wasn’t because she lacked ability or desire, but it was a habit that hadn’t been corrected by coaching or a competitive need for it to change. Success came easier at the level she was playing at, and she could (subconsciously) get away with not having that technical skill.

She’d spent years scoring goals at the highest level available to her without ever really seeing what the skill looked like at the level above. Although she was keen to fix it, it took her longer to do so than it might have if it had been corrected earlier.

To me, it illuminated one of the things that holds the game back in the USA at the grassroots level. We play on slow surfaces, often with well-intentioned but inadequate or outdated coaching, and the top hockey level to aspire to that’s (barely) visible is played by 18-22-year-olds.

When Scott discovered how few in the room of the nation’s top U16 players knew Xan de Waard, he asked an excellent question:

Watch to learn, not to consume

The 2026 World Cup just finished. And with it, as it happens, De Waard’s illustrious international career, as she retired from the Dutch team with silver rather than another gold, after Argentina’s shock shootout win in the final.

If you’ve been seeing the big moments on Instagram or TikTok, that’s a great start. But the next step? Watching the game highlights, which are all available for free on YouTube.

But if you really wanted to see what good looks like, get the Watch.Hockey app and pay for the World Cup tournament pass, which gives you 50 women’s games and 50 men’s games in full. It might be the most educational $50 you’ll spend on your field hockey career, if you use it well.

Pick a player in your position. Watch her for a full half - not just when she has the ball, but the whole time, or for us much as the TV angle will allow. Which technical basics does she execute at an outstanding level, over and over? How does she move off the ball to make herself available, or manipulate her opponent to create space before the ball even arrives? How does she defend - the intensity, the patience, the footwork?

And watch what happens when things go wrong. These are the best players in the world but they still make mistakes like you and I. What are the consequences? How do they respond? What does their body language tell you in the moments after?

Listen to the commentary; what things are they noticing or explaining about the game’s trends or momentum? It’s like having a guide by your side as you watch.

If you committed to watching one half of hockey a week with this kind of intentionality, you’d develop more understanding of the game’s intricacies than the majority of your peers. Not because you’re working harder. Because the bar for this is currently so low that almost nobody is doing it.

The World Cup just gave you two weeks of the best field hockey ever played, available whenever you want. Watch it like a student, not a fan.

My Strategy Sessions are back - one hour, three topics of your choosing, direct help with your recruiting process. Book via the link below or email hi@alangood.com for more details!

Book a Strategy Session

Something shifts after June 15.

Before it, recruiting is mostly theoretical. Maintaining lists, writing emails, attending showcases and tournaments. The conversations haven’t started yet, so keeping a longer list feels like good strategy - you don’t know who’s going to come through, so you cast wide.

After it, the list gets shorter but the conversations become real. A college coach is texting you. She’s following up on your call, or asking when you’re available for a visit. There’s a real person on the other end now, investing real time in you.

And some of those people, if you’re being honest with yourself, you’re keeping warm not because you actually want to go there, but just in case.

Just in case the programs you actually want don’t come through. Just in case this ends up being the best option available. So you keep responding, you stay polite, you leave the door open.

I’ve seen this pattern come up constantly in conversations with families going through this moment. A school stays in the mix not because there’s genuine excitement about it, but because removing it feels like admitting something nobody’s quite ready to admit yet.

That’s understandable, but it comes with a cost many families don’t account for.

The real cost of ‘maybe’

Every hour you spend managing a relationship with a program you don’t genuinely want is an hour not spent on one you do.

Although that sounds obvious, it’s not as pronounced when you’re in the thick of it, because maintaining a maybe doesn’t feel like wasted time - it feels like responsible hedging.

We do this in life, not just in recruiting. Saying “maybe” to Friday night plans with a friend in case something better comes up. Being “fully committed” to your club team even though you’ve been asking your high school friends if theirs might be a better fit.

You convince yourself you’re not doing anything wrong; you’re just keeping options open.

But there are only so many hours in a recruiting process. The coach at the program you’re actually excited about is also talking to other recruits. The visit slots fill up, commits trickle in, roster spots close.

And the time you’re spending keeping a backup warm is time you could be going deeper with the programs that actually matter to you.

There’s also a cost to the coach on the other end. She’s investing real time in you - calls, texts, camp invites, visit planning. If you’re responding to all of it while knowing privately that you’d never choose her program if something better came through, that’s worth sitting with.

Not because you owe her a commitment, but because honesty tends to produce better outcomes for everyone in the long run.

A question worth asking yourself

I started using this as a gut check on consulting calls this summer, and it’s stuck with me since.

For each school you’re still in contact with, ask yourself:

Excited doesn’t mean perfect, but it means you’d say yes without needing to talk yourself into it. Settling means you’d say yes primarily because you’re afraid you’ll run out of options.

Most recruits know immediately which one they feel, but they may not have allowed themselves to say it out loud yet.

If a school is one you’re excited about - just tell them.

The reason this matters comes from a pattern I’ve seen in recruiting over and over: coaches assume interest based on continued contact, recruits assume coaches know they’re serious because they keep responding. Both sides are inferring rather than saying it plainly.

So if you’re truly excited about the school, let them know. I appreciate there’s a vulnerability to that, but it changes the dynamic immediately and puts the ball in their court. You’ll find out faster if the interest is reciprocated.

If a school feels like settling - you have two choices.

Either take it off your list and tell them you’re going in a different direction, which is uncomfortable but cleaner. Or be honest about what would need to change for it to become a yes, and whether that’s realistic.

What you don’t want to do is leave it in the middle indefinitely. That’s where processes stall out, coaches lose interest, and nobody gets what they want.

The thing about backup plans

There’s a tension in all of this between the good strategy of having options, and keeping programs wam that you’d never actually choose. The latter becomes more like managing anxiety, not managing a recruiting process.

The programs worth keeping on your list are the ones where the answer to “excited or settling?” is genuinely unclear because you don’t know enough yet. Those deserve more investment - a visit, a deeper conversation, more time.

The ones where you already know the answer? Give them the courtesy of an honest exit. Give yourself the courtesy of focusing your energy where it belongs.

My Strategy Sessions will be starting back up in September - one hour, three topics of your choosing, direct help with your recruiting process.

Book a Strategy Session

We’ve all done it.

Standing in the shower, running the conversation in your head. Exactly what you’re going to say, how she’s going to respond, how you’ll handle it. It goes perfectly. You’re calm, articulate, reasonable. She gets it. Problem solved.

And then you actually have the conversation, and it goes nothing like that.

The gap between the rehearsed version and the real one is where most peer conversations fall apart. Not because the person didn’t have something valid to say, but because they only prepared the opening - and then improvised everything that came after.

When the other person gets defensive or shuts down, which they often do, there’s no plan for what happens next. So the conversation either escalates or collapses, and the underlying problem stays exactly where it was.

I wrote last week about how every team argues, and gave an idea for starting that difficult conversation when an issue with a team-mate spills over from being a hockey problem to a personal one. Today, I want to take it a few steps further.

Before you open your mouth

There’s a step most people skip, and it’s probably the most important one.

Before you have the conversation, think through how you’re going to respond if it goes badly. Not just what you want to say, but what you’ll do if she stonewalls you, gets defensive, or comes back at you hard.

Because if you go in without a plan for that, your natural response in the moment is going to be to get annoyed and uppity back at her, which doesn’t help. So just having a simple strategy ready changes the whole dynamic.

If she says she doesn’t want to talk about it, one option is to take a breath and say something like this:

Read more

When families compare D1 and D3 field hockey, the conversation usually goes straight to money.

I’ve known many a player choose low-level D1 over high-level D3 - effectively swapping the chance to compete for championships for a losing record, but scholarship money in the bank.

Ultimately, each family needs to do what’s right for themselves. The financial trade-off gets rightfully examined carefully.

However, the time trade-off rarely does.

The true time commitment

In the fall, things look pretty similar across D1 and D3, even though they are structured differently rules-wise.

During a D1 playing season, the NCAA limits countable athletically related activities to 20 hours per week, four hours per day, with one day off.

These are called CARA, and they cover practice, film, meetings, and strength and conditioning. Essentially, everything that’s done with a coach present.

What doesn’t count toward that limit is also significant. Team meals, treatment, travel time, promotional events, compliance meetings and so on - these are known as required athletically related activities (RARA), and don’t have hour limits.

So the 20-hour ceiling understates the real commitment. Add travel to away games, overnight stays, the time spent getting to and from facilities, and a D1 field hockey player’s week during the season looks quite different from what the rulebook suggests.

The estimated actual weekly hours a student-athlete puts in are in the 28-33 range - putting it closer to a full-time job, except with full-time study on top of that.

Across a full year, D1 programs are permitted up to 132 days of contact with their athletes.

D3 relies more on institutional balance, with no in-season limits as such, meaning things will feel just as intense during the fall as D1.

Depending on the program, its level and its championship aspirations, it may be even more rigorous.

However, the difference comes in the off-season. D3 programs have a far more relaxed spring, meaning you could have up to eight fewer weeks of official, coach-led hockey commitments.

The numbers only tell part of the story

The hours on a compliance sheet don’t capture what those hours actually feel like at either level, though.

College field hockey is faster than club. The higher up you go, in either division, the faster and more demanding it gets. Quicker decisions, larger physical demands, increased tactical complexity.

When you arrive as a freshman, you’re not just adjusting to a new school, new teammates, and a new coaching staff - you’re adjusting to a level of the game you’ve never experienced before. The mental load of that adjustment sits on top of everything else, regardless of division.

Practice is more intense than club, film sessions are more detailed, meetings require more preparation. The standard is higher, so the margin for switching off is lower.

When you’re in-season, field hockey isn’t something you do a few hours a day. It’s something you think about almost constantly - what you’re working on, what’s not clicking, what the game plan is, what the coach said after training. That’s true at Middlebury just as much as it’s true at Northwestern.

All of this is fine if you love field hockey and can eat, sleep, and breathe it.

The intrinsic motivation has to be there. Recognition, identity, the idea of “going D1” — those things fade over time. You’ll fare far better if you’re someone for whom the competition and the process of getting better sustains you. The type of player who walks off a tough practice thinking about what she could have done differently, not because a coach told her to, but because she can’t help it.

The D3 difference

The real difference for the D3 player comes in the spring.

D1 athletes typically do a couple of 8-hour weeks in late January and early February, then get back into 20-hour weeks for most of the semester and play up to five scrimmages. The spring often feels harder than the fall - the physical intensity is higher, and there are no weekend games to break up the monotony.

D3, by contrast, has much tighter rules for the spring. Coach-led hockey shuts down for longer, with around 16 days of practices and a single scrimmage inside a five-week window. It varies by conference, but the spring is significantly lighter.

That leaves more room for a demanding major, internships, a life outside of sport, and maybe even a semester abroad. Whether that trade-off appeals to you says a lot about what you actually want from the next four years.

Before you decide

The question you should ask yourself before committing is a simple one: does your daughter love field hockey, or does she love the idea of playing college field hockey?

Those are different things. One sustains you through two-a-days in August preseason, through sitting on the bench in October, through the film session after a loss where mistakes get watched back in a room full of your teammates. The other fades when things get hard.

132 days a year, 20 hours a week, four hours a day - that’s what you’re signing up for at D1, and it’s pretty much all gas, no brakes. D3 is similar for the fall, but totally different for the spring.

If the D1 level of commitment feels like an opportunity, not a sentence, then you’re along the right lines. If there’s any hesitation, it’s worth sitting with - not to talk yourself out of it, but to make sure you’re going in with your eyes open.

A note about D2 - as the name suggests, it sits somewhere in between, with partial scholarship available and a time commitment that’s similar to D1 in terms of rules, but with less hockey in the spring. I excluded it for this piece, but I have a future draft outlining more about the D2 experience in the pipeline.

Around the country this week, recruits on official visits are being told “we are a family here”.

Of course, coaches trying to recruit you want to give you all the good vibes and make campus feel like a home away from home.

But the bit they won’t “sell” is that every family argues and bickers. And the dysfunction that can often see blood relatives not talking to each other is often present in sports teams too.

The midseason relationship slump

Even teams that are tight off the field will encounter problems socially when things go wrong in games.

Early to mid-October is when the cracks often start to appear. Eight to ten weeks of living in each other’s pockets and the grind of the season will challenge even those with the strongest team culture and relationships, as things that had stayed on the field start bleeding into friendships.

“We compartmentalized well, until suddenly we couldn’t compartmentalize at all,” was how a leader of a top-25 program once put it to me.

She gave me a specific example. A player was going rogue from the team’s forward leading system - not following the movement patterns the coaches had prescribed, and everyone else had bought into.

Early on, teammates would let it go. Annoying, but fine. Then it kept happening. Results started suffering. And suddenly it wasn’t just frustrating, it was personal. People were pissed off, not just at the behavior, but at the person.

And they were uncertain about how to address it without blowing up the friendship.

It turns out, you can play team sports for ten years and never be taught how to have a hard conversation with a teammate. The one where you have to tell someone you care about that something they’re doing is affecting the team - and do it in a way that doesn’t make everything worse.

Conflict Resolution 101

What I told her was pretty simple. If you have a strong relationship with someone, that’s actually permission to hold them accountable, not a reason to stay quiet. They already know you care about them off the field, and there’s trust in the friendship that you can lean on.

Go to her and tell her there’s something hockey-related you need to raise. Signal upfront that it might not be easy to hear, but that it comes from a place of wanting to help her and the team. Use “when you do this, I feel that” rather than “you always do this.” Ask if there’s anything you can do to support her or help find a mutually agreeable solution.

You might still get a defensive reaction the first time, but it’s unlikely to break the friendship. And often, a few days later, things shift.

For coaches who spend time educating their players on this, it can feel like Groundhog Day in leadership group meetings. You sit down with the captains and they bring up a problem - this player did this, that situation got out of hand - and the coaches ask what they’d done about it. Usually the answer was nothing, or “I didn’t know what to do”.

The standard you walk past is the new one you accept. That was the message, over and over again. You give them some tools and ideas like the ones in this newsletter, and hope they eventually take action.

When the teams I’ve been involved with did have a framework - when players had been given the tools and actually used them - the problems typically got resolved. Not always cleanly, not always quickly. Sometimes the first conversation didn’t land, and someone else had to follow up. Occasionally, it took an arm around the shoulder a few days later. But it got resolved, without coaches having to step in, and without the friendship breaking.

Culture eats talent

The most successful teams I’ve been involved with weren’t just the most talented. They were the ones where the accountability spread furthest.

It starts with coaches caring about this stuff and being intentional about it. It gets stronger when the captains decide to own it, and accept the burden of leadership. But it’s most powerful when the whole team buys in - when everyone feels the permission to have the hard conversation, and the responsibility to have it.

Those were the best teams I’ve worked with. Not because of the players we had, but because of what they were willing to do when things got difficult.

All of this is relevant to recruiting in a way that doesn’t get talked about enough.

When you visit a campus and try to get a feel for the team culture, this is part of what you’re actually sensing. Do these players hold each other accountable, or do they let things slide? Is the hard conversation something that happens here, or something everyone avoids?

And when you arrive - whenever that is - you’re going to encounter conflict with teammates. Not because the program is broken or the culture is bad. Because that’s what happens when you put a group of driven, competitive people in close quarters for months at a time.

When they tell you they’re like a “family”, make sure you’re choosing a family that addresses conflicts in the open rather than behind your back.

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After an official visit, when the recruit is on the drive home and the day is winding down, the real conversation begins.

Sometimes it’s the coaching staff sitting down together - a formal debrief, everyone around the table.

It could also be more informal; one coach catching the other in the hallway, or popping into an office to get the lowdown on how they thought the visit went.

Either way, it happens. And what gets said in those conversations shapes what happens next in a recruit’s process in ways she’ll never fully see.

This piece is about that conversation.

The staff isn’t one voice

When a family thinks about “the program” recruiting their daughter, they tend to imagine a single entity with a single opinion.

“This school seems to really like her.”

“That school doesn’t seem interested.”

In reality, a D1 coaching staff is a group of three or four coaches with different relationships, different information, and different amounts of skin in the game when it comes to any given recruit. The support staff - athletic trainers, strength coaches, directors of operations - will also interact with recruits on visits and potentially have their say too.

At programs that do this well, where the head coach doesn’t rule with an iron fist and wants to empower their assistants, recruiting evaluation is a structured exercise.

Coaches independently rate players after tournaments - each staff member scores the same recruit without seeing anyone else’s numbers first, then the data gets charted. Where there’s agreement, there’s confidence. Where there are outliers, there’s a conversation.

The disagreement is the point. It surfaces information that might not come out in a group setting, where groupthink can take over and strong opinion can anchor everyone else. It also challenges assistant coaches to speak their minds and develop autonomous thoughts on players, rather than just going along with whatever the head coach wants.

The same logic applies to exercises such as asking each coach to name their five essential recruits from the class, or ranking a pool of 20 players, or dividing them into scholarship tiers.

The goal of these exercises is to generate data that backs up or challenges a decision - not to let one person’s enthusiasm or another’s hesitation drive the outcome without scrutiny.

This is the machinery running in the background, while a recruit is sending emails and wondering why she hasn’t heard back.

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Somewhere in your club’s parent network right now, someone knows something. Or, at least, they think they do.

A parent heard from another parent that a certain program is cutting players to make roster space for new recruits. A coach mentioned to someone that the head coach at such-and-such a school is on thin ice after a subpar season. A girl from your high school team committed to a program you were interested in, and within the hour, the texts are flying about the why, the how, and the injustice of it all.

This is peak rumor season in field hockey recruiting. Visits are starting, another bunch of commitments will come in the aftermath, and the information gaps are filling with speculation, jealousy, and incomplete truths.

Most of it is wrong, though. And even the parts that aren’t wrong don’t really concern you.

Why the intel is usually unreliable

There are three reasons the rumor mill mostly produces garbage.

The first is incentives.

People in a recruiting network aren’t neutral sources. A parent who tells you their daughter got a “full ride” scholarship offer might not want to admit publicly that it was actually a fraction of that - or that there was no offer at all.

Similarly, a parent who shares that another family was contacted by this coach or invited to that clinic might be guessing, working from secondhand information, or softening a story to make their own daughter’s situation look better by comparison.

Everyone in the recruiting process has something at stake and something to hide, and that shapes what they share and how they share it.

The second is jealousy. When a player from your club commits somewhere you were interested in, the natural instinct is to ask why.

But the search for an explanation produces motivated reasoning as our less flattering instincts kick in. “She only got in because her parents are alumni” or “The club coach must have advocated for her” are things people say when they need a reason that has nothing to do with their own daughter’s process. It might feel good to justify it this way, but it’s rarely the whole story.

The third is that you don’t know what you don’t know. The rumors about programs are usually the worst offenders here - coaches getting fired, players getting cut, programs only recruiting from certain clubs, and so on.

Some are true, most are distorted, a few are totally fabricated. And even when there’s something to it, you’re getting a version of it filtered through two or three conversations, with the original context long gone.

How the rumor mill starts

Let’s return to that notion of a player committing to a school someone else local really wants. The Instagram post will barely have its first few likes before the rumors and gossip start.

“I heard she was told she won’t play but was desperate enough to take the offer”

“Surely she’s not getting money from a program at that level”

“I don’t know what they see in her, she’s not even the best player on her high school team”

And so on. Maybe the rumor is accurate, or has a kernel of truth to it. But it still doesn’t explain why, and the why is the part nobody outside the program can see.

Programs fill their rosters from multiple tiers simultaneously. A coach might be recruiting one or two top scholarship targets, a couple of mid-range offers, and someone who brings positional depth or culture fit at lower or no cost.

Two players being evaluated by the same program might be in completely different conversations and buckets - one being courted for a scholarship spot, one being asked to fill a different role entirely. Neither outcome is a direct comment on the other player.

When you hear a rumor and start measuring your daughter against it, you’re comparing two situations that might not be comparable at all.

Run your own race

You’ve heard that advice before. From me, and plenty of others.

But it’s worth naming the specific thing that makes the rumor mill so damaging beyond just the distraction. When you’re spending energy analyzing someone else’s commitment or process - what she got, why she got it, whether it makes sense - you’re orienting around what you don’t have rather than what you do.

That energy would be far better spent on the controllables in your own process - who you need to email and follow up with, which schools you should add to your list, which ones you should move on from, and so on.

The rumor mill will always have something to offer: a new piece of intel, a fresh reason to feel like you’re falling behind, another commitment to dissect. Which means the decision to stop listening to it has to be an active choice, not something that happens by accident.

Your process is yours. The noise isn’t.

I’ve really enjoyed the first round of my new Strategy Sessions - one hour, three topics of your choosing, direct help with your recruiting process. These are now shut down for the rest of August as I’ll be at the World Cup with the USA WNT (this piece comes to you from our holding camp in Spain!), but bookings are open for September and beyond.

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June 15 opened the contact window. Coaches could finally text, call, and email. After two years of one-sided communication, both sides could actually talk to each other.

Then, there was another date to wait for.

August 1 is when official and unofficial visits can begin for the class of 2028. It’s another moment families have been waiting for - the chance to hang out with the team, maybe stay in a dorm overnight, get to know the coaches in person, and see the campus.

But for some recruits, an early August visit is going to feel different than they imagined. Here’s what to know before you go.

The six weeks in between

A lot happens in the gap between June 15 and August 1, even if most of it isn’t visible.

Programs are pruning their lists. Some recruits have committed elsewhere. Others have narrowed their own lists and quietly “broken up with” certain programs. It might have happened the other way around too, if a program saw someone play again and decided to cut them loose.

Coaches are tracking where everyone stands, figuring out who still needs to be convinced to get on campus, and who just needs a visit to confirm what they already feel.

For programs that landed their top targets early, visits aren’t as urgent. For programs that missed on several recruits and need to make up ground, August 1 can’t come soon enough. They’re actively working to get certain players on campus because they believe a visit will close what calls couldn’t.

It’s similar on the athlete side. You might have arranged a visit to a school you already know you love, because you just need to get the feeling. Maybe you’re headed to a school that wasn’t even on your list before June 15, but the relationship has developed in a promising way.

Either way, both sides have been itching to get on with visits during this seemingly arbitrary time between first contact and being allowed to get on campus and experience it.

All of that context and waiting shapes what you’re walking into when you arrive.

What early August visits are and aren’t

An early August visit will give you about 80-90% of what you’d get later in the fall. That’s still a lot, and typically enough to make a decision if needs be. But it’s worth acknowledging what you won’t be getting if you plan a visit for early August.

The campus in August, before the semester starts, is much quieter than it will be in a few weeks once school has started. No students milling between classes, no dining halls at full capacity, no sense of the rhythm and density of normal college life. You’re evaluating the bones of a place without its usual heartbeat. It’s useful information, but it’s incomplete.

Later in the fall, programs often schedule visits to coincide with a home game. You watch from the stands, but you might also be in a pregame team meeting the night before. You see how the staff handles competition, how players carry themselves under pressure, what the atmosphere around the program actually feels like. You don’t get that in August.

Depending on the preseason start date, the team may not be on campus yet - or maybe not all of them. Some programs will run camps and clinics around this time to help ensure their own players (who typically work the event) are around, but it will vary from school to school.

So if they haven’t started practices yet, you won’t have one of those to observe up close and personal either, which is another visit element most players tend to enjoy.

Therefore, if you’re visiting in the first week of August, you may get a slightly different version of the team experience than you’d get once preseason is underway.

Once preseason starts, most of that changes. The team is practicing, available for hosting, and the visit starts to look much more like what you’d expect.

For some recruits, this stuff won’t matter as much, but in my experience, “time with the team” is usually among a top visit request. So it’s worth getting your itinerary ahead of time and seeing how much of that you’re getting and in what contexts.

But… going early often suits both sides

Both sides have good reasons for wanting to visit in early August, beyond the waiting game they’ve been forced to play.

The coach hosting your visit is about to start preseason, which is one of the busiest times of the year for them. There aren’t hours limits like there will be once school starts, so it’s often multiple team events - practices, conditioning, strength work, team meetings, film study, or team bonding events - to plan and execute each day.

Few college coaches enjoy the fact that they’re trying to prioritize both their current and future teams at the same time once preseason gets underway. Even without the added events of a visit, a preseason workday might already be 12-14 hours long.

Simultaneously trying to show a recruit the best version of their program is hugely taxing on top of that. Both of those things are happening at once, and both of them matter a lot.

So many coaches like to get a bunch of visits done in the first week of August, before the madness fully begins.

It’s similarly complicated for recruits who are heading into their own high school seasons and are already practicing daily, and missing some of that to take their college visits.

Many are keen to do early August visits so they don’t miss any school later in the semester, so there are multiple competing interests there too.

The timing question

None of this means you have to wait.

Waiting for a September or October visit that gives you the full campus experience has a potential cost. The program might commit someone else in the meantime. If a coach has made you an offer, there’s no guarantee that she will hold that spot forever.

And if you’re down to your final few schools and close to a decision, adding another month to your timeline for the sake of a slightly more complete visit may not be the right trade.

The question to ask yourself before you decide on an early August visit is whether what you’ll see will be enough to help you make your mind up about that school and that program.

August visits aren't a consolation prize. They're just a different version of the experience, and knowing the difference is what lets you use them well.

I have a couple of Strategy Session time slots available this week before I leave for Europe with the USA WNT for the World Cup. One hour, three topics of your choosing. These are the last ones until September, so book now if you’ve hit a recruiting roadblock you need help with!

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We were running a technical goalscoring exercise. Forwards and goalkeepers, no defenders, just working through connections and shooting techniques inside the circle.

One of the forwards received the ball with her back to goal, took her first touch across her body to get her feet facing forward, and shaped to shoot.

The ball whizzed into the sideboard, and the goalkeeper called a halt to the exercise.

“You won’t have time to turn in a game when you’re being tightly marked. Shoot that from your backspace, it needs to be realistic.”

This was coaching, but from a team-mate. Firm, direct, no apology for saying it. The forward nodded, and they ran it again.

A few minutes later, a different player took a big backswing on a shot from close range - the kind you can get away with when there are no defenders and nobody contesting it. The goalkeeper called that out too.

“What are you doing? You’re a few yards from goal. You won’t have that time and space when it’s for real. Hands apart, get it off your stick quicker.”

Again: a teammate, not a coach. Direct, no softening.

In the highest performing environments I’ve been in, this is what separates groups that consistently improve from ones that plateau. If you have one or two who do it, great, but when it’s a majority, it elevates the environment massively.

What elite athletes actually demand

The best players I’ve been around are demanding. Of themselves, each other, and their coaches.

They ask for what they need from teammates: the right pass, the right lead, the right weight on the ball. They understand that 11 players are codependent on each other, and that the group only gets better if everyone holds everyone else to the same standard they hold themselves.

If something isn’t working in a training session, they’ll let the coaches know. If an exercise feels unrealistic, they’ll push back on it. If a teammate is cutting corners, someone will notice, and someone will say something.

This sounds simple, but most players - even good ones - often don’t do it.

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Most families approach a campus visit from one of two places.

The first: we are here to evaluate this program. We’re checking the facilities, meeting the coaches, getting a feel for whether our daughter could be happy here for four years. The visit is ours to run.

The second: we need to make a good impression. Say the right things, ask smart questions, don’t embarrass ourselves. The visit is something we have to pass.

Both of those instincts are right. Neither of them is the whole picture.

A campus visit is the one moment in the entire recruiting process where genuine, unfiltered information flows in both directions simultaneously. The coach is learning something real about you at the exact moment you’re learning something real about them. Understanding that changes how you experience every part of the day.

The campus tour

What you think is happening: You’re seeing the facilities, getting a sense of the place, deciding whether it feels right.

What the coach thinks is happening: She’s watching how you engage. Are you asking questions, or waiting to be told things? Do you notice details - the locker room quirks, the film room setup, what’s on the walls - or do you walk through it passively? A recruit who asks about something specific she noticed tells a coach something. A recruit who nods along to everything tells a coach something different.

The facilities are largely irrelevant to the evaluation. How you move through them isn’t.

The meal with the players

What you think is happening: A chance to connect, have fun, get a feel for the team culture.

What the coach thinks is happening: This is the most unfiltered data point of the entire visit. She’s not in the room, which means nobody is performing for her. What her players report back - and they always report back - carries enormous weight. Did your daughter ask questions or talk about herself? Did she seem genuinely curious about what their experience is like, or did she spend the meal selling herself? Was she easy to be around?

The meal with the players isn’t a social event with recruiting on the side. It’s the other way around.

The one-on-one with the head coach

What you think is happening: An important meeting where you need to ask smart questions and make a strong impression.

What the coach thinks is happening: She’s finding out whether there’s a real person behind the recruit. Does she push back on anything, or agree with everything? Does she ask something that could only come from someone who’s actually thought about this program specifically? Is there any moment where she says something surprising, or is the whole conversation exactly what a well-prepared recruit would say?

Coaches have these meetings constantly. They can tell the difference between genuine curiosity and performed curiosity within a few minutes. The families who treat this as a test to pass often produce exactly that: a performance. The ones who treat it as a real conversation tend to leave a different kind of impression.

Watching practice

What you think is happening: You’re evaluating the coaching style, the team’s level, the intensity of the environment, and how everyone treats each other under a bit of pressure. You're there to observe, so you hang back and take it in. Watch quietly, don't get in the way, be respectful of the space. That's the polite thing to do.

What the coach thinks is happening: He's watching what you watch - and hanging back reads as passive. The recruits who ask if they can stand closer to hear the team talks, who notice something specific about how the team plays and ask about it afterwards, who engage with what they're seeing rather than observe it from a distance - those are the ones who leave an impression.

A player who says "I noticed your defenders force to the forehand rather than the baseline when defending the circle - is that deliberate?" has just told a coach something about how she watches the game. Most recruits never ask a follow-up question about what they saw. Polite observation is forgettable. Genuine engagement isn't.

The moment before you leave

What you think is happening: You don’t want to seem too eager or put pressure on the relationship, so you keep it warm but noncommittal. Thank them for everything, say you have a lot to think about, follow up with a nice email tomorrow.

What the coach thinks is happening: Does she say anything real? After a full day or two together, a recruit who leaves with the same vague positivity she arrived with gives a coach nothing to work with. Both sides have just invested hours in this.

The goodbye is the moment to say something true - not a commitment if you aren’t ready for that, not a performance, just honesty. “I want to be transparent - this visit moved this program up significantly for me” is a sentence that costs nothing to say and changes everything about how a coach thinks about you when you walk out the door. Most recruits never say it.

The thing both sides forget

The visit is not an audition. It’s not an inspection tour. It’s the one moment in a process that is otherwise defined by incomplete information and strategic ambiguity where both sides get to find out something true about the other.

The families who do this well aren’t the ones who perform flawlessly or interrogate the program most aggressively. They’re the ones who show up as themselves - curious, direct, paying attention- and let that be enough.

Before I leave for Europe with the USA WNT for the World Cup next month, I'm opening up a handful of one-to-one Strategy Sessions. One hour, three topics of your choosing. A few spots left in July!

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Two families hired me for one hour each this June. Not a package. Not a monthly retainer. One conversation.

Both their daughters committed to top D1 programs within two weeks of that call.

That’s by design. The Strategy Session is one hour, on purpose. No package, no standing commitment, no retainer to renew. Because the thing families are actually missing isn’t more information or more access. It’s someone who knows the college coach side sitting with their exact situation for an hour and helping them think their way through it.

Here’s what that looked like for these two families.

Family one came to me before June 15, on the front end of the process rather than deep into it. Her parents could already see offers were going to move at different speeds once contact opened, and they worried her quiet personality might work against her in those early calls.

We spent the hour on two things: how to think about timelines and offers before they even arrived, and how she talked about herself. I asked her the kind of questions I’d have asked a recruit when I was a college coach; not about stats, but about her personality. Specific stories instead of rehearsed lines. What she’d say about a weakness. Her leadership style. What she actually wanted to know about a program before deciding.

Her mom put it this way afterward:

On the quiet-versus-loud worry, I told her that quiet isn't a flaw. It's a feature of who she is, not something to fix before a call. Rather than trying to perform a loud, extroverted version of herself to impress coaches, she was better off leaning into her actual style, the kind of leadership that shows up in how she supports a teammate one-on-one. That's not something a blog post can hand you, because it isn't universal. The same advice would be wrong for a kid who thrives being loud and out front.

Family two came to me at the end of June, after the post-June-15th wave had already hit. Calls, offers, a full inbox, and no clear way to sort through any of it.

They didn’t need someone to prepare them for what was coming. They needed someone to help them make sense of what had already landed: which programs were worth staying in on, how to handle the pressure tactics and fake deadlines coaches lean on, how to tune out the noise around other recruits’ commitments, and how to prep for NCCs by engaging with schools that had shown interest, rather than chasing those who hadn’t.

Neither family walked away with a binder of generic advice. They walked away with a decision framework built for their daughter, made by someone who’s sat on the other side of the recruiting desk and knows what coaches mean when they say the things they say.

That’s the entire premise of The Strategy Session. One hour, one family, one specific situation - not a template stretched to fit everyone.

If it sounds like something that could help on your recruiting journey, book some time on my calendar and we can start figuring it out together.

You can read the full testimonials from these families here and here. Click the button below to reserve a 60-minute consultation with me - you pick three topics for us to discuss in detail. Each slot costs $125.

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Page 50 of Daniel Coyle’s The Culture Code contains one of the most useful sentences ever written about how elite organizations make decisions about people.

Coyle is writing about the San Antonio Spurs and how they built one of the most successful dynasties in NBA history. He notes that their scouting template includes a checkbox labeled “Not a Spur.” A check in that box means the player will not be pursued, no matter how talented he is.

No explanation required. No appeal process. One check from a Spurs scout and it’s over.

I read that and recognized it immediately - because I had my own version.

Looking for the No as well as the Yes

When I was evaluating recruits as a college coach, I had things I was looking for - binary things, yes or no - and if a player didn’t tick any of them, she wasn’t getting brought to my head coach’s attention. Didn’t matter how good she was.

These weren’t skill markers. The hockey part is partially known from the video you watch before deciding to watch a player live, and can be seen pretty clearly.

What I was watching for was harder to name. And that’s the point.

Every program has its own version of the checkbox. The things on the list aren’t standardized. They’re not published anywhere. They reflect what that particular coach values, what that particular culture requires, what that particular staff has decided is non-negotiable for them.

At some programs it’s effort-based - work rate, tackling back, movement off the ball. At others it’s whether a player demands the ball when the game is on the line. Whether she seems to want to win even when the stakes feel low. Whether there’s something in how she competes that tells you she’s a gamer in the way that word actually means, not as a compliment people hand out freely, but as a real quality you either see or you don’t.

The software coaches use at recruiting tournaments often has a tagging system. Labels you can attach to a prospect’s profile as you watch. Those labels look like organizational tools. For a lot of coaches they’re actually the checkboxes - the real-time record of whether a player is crossing thresholds that have nothing to do with her highlight reel.

A player can be on a list and fall off it because of a tag she never knew existed.

Why this matters

The recruiting process is visible at the top and invisible everywhere else. Families can see the email exchanges, the camp invitations, the June 15 calls. What they can’t see is the evaluation happening before any of that - the quiet, parallel assessment running alongside the skill evaluation.

A player who dominates a game but drops her head after every turnover is showing coaches something. A player who’s having a quiet game but competes hard in every transition is showing coaches something else. A player who argues with her club coach on the sideline - or rolls her eyes when subbed - is showing coaches something they will remember long after they’ve forgotten the score.

Coyle goes on to note that the Spurs’ approach wasn’t simply about selecting high-character players.

Some of their best players had red flags elsewhere before joining San Antonio. Boris Diaw was called lazy and overweight at Charlotte. Patty Mills was released by his Chinese team for allegedly faking an injury. Danny Green was cut by Cleveland for his casual approach to defense.

The checkbox wasn’t a character test in the traditional sense. It was a culture fit test. The question wasn’t “is this person perfect?” It was “is there something here that tells me this person won’t be one of us?”

That distinction is important. The Spurs weren’t filtering for perfect people. Several of their best players had been ‘trouble’ elsewhere - players who were called lazy, released for faking injuries, cut for casual defending. They weren’t “Not a Spur” because something about how they played or competed told Spurs scouts they’d be right for that specific culture.

One size can’t fit all

That is the nuance worth sitting with. A player who doesn’t tick the boxes for one program might tick every box for another. The checkboxes aren’t universal. They’re program-specific, which is why the “what are coaches looking for in a player” questions are difficult to answer.

What makes you a culture fit at a “dot-to-dot hockey” program with a demanding coach might look completely different from what makes you a culture fit somewhere that values creativity and individual expression.

You’re not being judged against some universal standard. You’re being judged against a standard you can’t see, that varies from program to program.

Ultimately, if a program has five things on their list and you tick three or four of them, you’re probably staying in the conversation. If a player of similar ability only ticks one or two, that gap - invisible to everyone except the coach making the notes - is often what separates the ones who get calls from the ones who wonder why they didn’t.

The checkbox exists whether you know about it or not. The only question is which side of it you end up on.

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Over the last two weeks I’ve covered what the 5-for-5 ruling means at the macro level, and what’s happening inside programs as coaches navigate the most complex roster puzzle they’ve ever faced.

Today is about you. Specifically, about the single biggest mistake I think families are going to make in this environment, and how to avoid it.

The scarcity trap

When spots feel scarce, the natural human response is to act quickly. Lock something down before it disappears. Say yes before someone else does.

That instinct is understandable. The math is real: fewer spots, more competition, and a recruiting environment moving faster than it should. Some families will read the last two pieces and conclude that the only rational response is to take the first credible offer that comes along.

There’s even advice circulating right now in other sports, from people who should know better, that amounts to: if you have a good offer on the table, say yes now.

That advice isn’t wrong exactly. It’s incomplete in a way that can cause real harm.

A panicked commitment to the wrong program feels like a safe outcome. It comes with a four-year price tag and a transfer portal entry waiting at the other end. The families who navigate this era well won’t be the ones who move fastest. They’ll be the ones who move deliberately, with clarity about what they want and enough discipline not to let fear make the decision for them.

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Women’s lacrosse quietly made a sensible rule change recently. Their contact date - the equivalent of our June 15 - used to open at midnight. They’ve moved it to noon.

That’s it. That’s the whole change. And the fact that it needed to be made at all says something important.

The midnight circus

In sports with high-volume recruiting - football, basketball, and to a lesser extent lacrosse - the contact date opening at midnight has produced a genuinely bizarre ritual.

Coaches sending texts and emails the moment the clock ticks over. Some calling players on the phone. Families sitting up waiting to see who reaches out, treating midnight like New Year’s Eve, except instead of champagne there’s just anxiety and a phone screen.

Field hockey isn’t as extreme as some sports. Coaches calling players at midnight isn’t standard practice here the way it is elsewhere… yet. But the energy around June 15 - the staying up, the waiting, the checking the phone - is the same, as many send their first texts or emails at 12:01am.

And it’s worth asking whether any of it actually makes sense.

What drives coaches to do this

I’ll be honest about the incentives, because they’re real even if the behavior is slightly unhinged.

Coaches contact players at midnight because they’re afraid. Afraid that being second signals lesser interest. Afraid that by the time they reach out at a civilized hour, a player has already fielded multiple offers and mentally closed her list. Afraid of missing their shot entirely.

There are cases - rare, but real - where a player has committed before a coach even gets to talk to her. And there are cases where a player’s first day is so full of conversations that programs who reached out later never got a look-in. So the fear isn’t completely irrational.

But think about what this logic actually produces. A coach who has spent two or three years watching a player, building her case internally, carefully crafting her June 15 list - and her strategy for the most important contact moment of the recruiting cycle is to send a text at midnight because she's worried about being beaten by eight hours.

The part that bothers me

Here’s the thing that’s always bothered me more than the coaches’ behavior, though: what it requires of the families.

These are teenage girls. The night before June 15 is already one of the most anxious nights of their young lives - the culmination of months or years of work, uncertainty, comparison, waiting. What they should be doing is trying, against all those nerves and butterflies, to actually get some sleep. So that when the calls and texts and requests start coming in, they’re rested, clear-headed, and able to handle what might be a very full and very important day.

Instead, some of them are sitting up until midnight to see who reaches out. And then not going to sleep because more texts are coming. And then realizing that some coaches operate on West Coast time, which means midnight their time is 3am on the East Coast. And suddenly a teenager is awake at 3am, exhausted, trying to process information about the most significant decision of her athletic life so far.

You wouldn’t text a colleague at midnight in most cases. If you knew they were sitting up waiting for it, you’d feel uncomfortable about that - because it’s not a reasonable thing to ask of another adult, let alone a 16-year-old.

There’s a lack of respect baked into the midnight culture that the lacrosse governing body has now, quietly and correctly, decided to do something about.

What I actually did as a coach

I scheduled my texts and emails to send at 8 or 9am.

Not because I was trying to be noble about it, but because it made more sense. A player who’s slept, who’s had breakfast, who’s sitting with her family and actually present for the day - that’s the player I want to have a first conversation with. Not the one who’s been awake since midnight running on adrenaline and notifications.

The coaches who reach out at midnight aren’t more committed. They’re more anxious. And that anxiety, while understandable, isn’t something families should have to absorb on top of everything else they’re already carrying.

June 15 has passed for this cycle, so this is less about this year and more about putting something on record.

If you have a younger player - a freshman or sophomore - file this away. The night before June 15, the most useful thing you can do as a family is agree, together, that you’re going to sleep. The right coaches will still be there in the morning. The texts that matter will still be there when you wake up. An offer that only exists if you respond at midnight isn’t an offer worth having.

Go to sleep.

This piece is an example of the post-June 15 madness; if you want a guide through it, or just want to ask all your recruiting questions with non-judgmental answers, The Recruiting Advisor is available 24/7, is trained specifically on field hockey recruiting, and can help you strategize your next steps.

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Tuesday’s piece covered what the 5-in-5 ruling means at the macro level - the math, the portal surge, the compression of spots for high school players. Today, I want to go inside the room.

The part that families can’t see right now is that college coaches are navigating one of the most complex roster puzzles they’ve ever faced - and they’re doing it in real time, while simultaneously managing recruiting conversations with your daughter.

The dual calendar problem

In a normal year, June 15 is a coach’s primary focus in late spring. Their list is built, their priorities are ranked, and the contact window opening is the moment they’ve been working toward for months.

This year was different. While coaches were finalizing their June 15 lists, a second conversation was happening simultaneously - behind closed doors, with their current players.

The question being asked: if 5-in-5 passes, do you want to stay for a fifth year?

That conversation matters enormously for recruiting families, because every current player who says yes is a roster spot that may no longer be available for an incoming recruit. And these conversations were happening - in some cases, being resolved - before June 15 even arrived.

Those fifth-year agreements are verbal. Just like a recruit’s verbal commitment, a current player’s agreement to stay for a fifth year carries no contractual weight until paperwork is signed.

A rising junior can say yes now and change her mind in the spring of 2028. She might decide she doesn’t want to pursue a graduate degree. She might lose form and playing time, or fall out with the coaching staff. She might have two excellent years, and decide to test herself at a higher level or in a different conference.

Which means coaches building their rosters around fifth-year verbal agreements are carrying the same uncertainty that families experience when their daughter verbally commits. The jeopardy runs in both directions.

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