What coaches still can't do after June 15
The rule that catches families off guard every single year
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.