The weight of the wait

On leaving college coaching, June 15, and what changes when you step out of the room

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.

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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.

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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.

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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: