The day you commit to play college field hockey is a wild one emotionally.
The Instagram post, and your phone blowing up. The joyful calls to tell your extended family. The relief of having made a decision after months, maybe years, of uncertainty. For a while, everything feels settled.
And then, fairly quickly, it gets… weirdly quiet.
You’ve spent the last few months juggling a ton of communication with college coaches. Zooms calls, texts, emails, group chats, and so on. You built solid relationships with a few coaching staffs, and until the end, you had them messaging you every few days to check in on your visit schedule, nudging you toward a decision timeline, following up when they hadn’t heard back.
Now, that cadence slows down considerably. The urgency that defined the final weeks of your recruiting process has gone away.
That is probably a relief overall, but the relationship with the college coaching staff you committed to is going to change now too.
The second waiting game
The recruiting relationship, for all its warmth and genuine connection, has an uncomfortable truth underpinning it: both sides need something from each other. The coach needs to fill her class. You need to find your school.
That mutual need creates some natural energy - regular contact, meaningful conversations about a shared future together, and a sense of momentum. When you commit, the mutual need goes dormant for a while.
The coach still cares about you, and she’s obviously still planning for you to be part of her program. But the urgency that was powering all those check-ins has gone, because she now has the thing she needed.
What she’s dealing with instead is her current season, her current team, and the other recruits she still needs to get decisions from. Her bandwidth was always limited, but now it gets allocated somewhere else.
There’s a strange symmetry to this moment.
You spent years waiting to start the recruiting process. And then, however many months later, you committed, only to discover there’s another wait on the other side.
This one is longer and quieter, because it’ll be the best part of two years before you arrive on campus. There will be touchpoints between now and then - a coach at your tournament, a clinic visit, a check-in text here and there, a group visit with your class in senior spring - but nothing like the frequency of what you just went through.
What the relationship looks like now
The communication that happens in this window tends to be more genuine and less transactional than what came before - which is a good thing, even if it doesn’t feel that way at first.
During recruiting, every interaction had a subtext. Every text from a coach was partly about keeping you engaged. Every update you sent was partly about staying visible. That all sounds pretty cynical, but it’s just how the process works.
After commitment, that subtext mostly disappears. When a coach checks in now, it’s because she wants to. When you text her after a game, it’s because you actually care, and those are your future teammates. The relationship gets to be more real, even if it’s quieter.
You still need to tell your college coaches which tournaments you’re playing at (except now it’s one email, instead of dozens!) and they’ll still come watch you play to see how you’re progressing. The most highly engaged ones will likely give you some feedback too. They’ll want to see you at clinics so you’re staying physically connected to the program, and so they get to coach you.
Beyond that, some committed players are really good at finding reasons to keep the relationship going. They’ll drop a text after a big win, let the coach know they watched the game, mention when they’re next coming to watch in person. Most coaches appreciate this; it signals that the player is engaged, that she’s following the program, that the commitment wasn’t just a decision she made and filed away.
I appreciate you also don’t want to seem annoying or needy though, so the simplest way to navigate this is to just ask. Something like: “I want to stay connected, but I also don’t want to bother you during your season - how often do you want to hear from me?” is a perfectly reasonable thing to say to a coach you’re going to spend four years of your life with.
In any case, the quiet that follows the commitment isn't necessarily a problem to solve - it's just the gap between one chapter ending and the next one beginning. It'll get loud again soon enough.
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