From the addition of a 90-second shot clock in the women’s game to the correction of a timeout loophole that allowed men’s teams to run off time in the final minutes of a game or a half, the NCAA has embraced lacrosse’s reputation as “the fastest sport on two feet” this season by implementing new rules to increase the pace of play.
But the NCAA’s latest piece of legislation, spearheaded by Duke women’s lacrosse head coach Kerstin Kimel, attempts to slow down one of the most important aspects of the game: recruiting.
In recent years, early recruiting for men’s and women’s lacrosse has become increasingly common and extremely competitive, with coaches soliciting younger and younger players to lock in the game's most impressive talents. As a result, prospective players have begun making non-binding verbal commitments as early as eighth grade, five years before they would step on a college campus as a student. The new legislation, passed in the form of Proposal No. 2017-1, bans all recruiting contact between coaches and prospective student-athletes until Sept. 1 of their junior year of high school.
“The world looks one way when you’re 13 or 14 and then it looks a lot different when you’re 17 and 18 and ready to go off to school,” said Kimel, who serves as the Division I legislation committee chair for the Intercollegiate Women's Lacrosse Association. “Not only have I been coaching for a long time and was uncomfortable with that, but I’m also a parent of kids in that age group, so it wasn’t very hard for me and some of the other coaches to really wrap our heads around the fact that these kids are just way too young to be on campuses and thinking about these things."
In the past, coaches were not allowed to contact recruits directly until after Sept. 1 of their junior year, but they could respond to contact initiated by the recruits. They could also communicate through club lacrosse coaches, who acted as a third-party link between players and coaches.
College developmental camps and campuses were considered “safe zones” under the former set of rules. Recruits and coaches could communicate freely at camps or on campus, providing an avenue for coaches to reach out to potential student-athletes without navigating through third parties or breaking any of the NCAA’s recruiting rules.
“It was criminal what we were doing as coaches to these young people,” Duke men’s lacrosse head coach John Danowski said. “I had been embarrassed for my profession that we thought that it was okay, but some coaches are businessmen, and they saw it as an advantage to either push the envelope admissions-wise or push the envelope with young people and their families when they clearly are not ready to make a decision.”
Now, recruits and coaches cannot come into direct contact about recruiting at all before Sept. 1 of the recruit’s junior year, closing the loophole involving contact initiated by recruits.
A whopping 85 percent of NCAA Division I coaches were in favor of the stricter recruiting rules. Although many of them were likely motivated to support the change by preventing students from making such a consequential decision in eighth or ninth grade, some coaches have also found that prospective players they recruited early did not meet expectations. Regardless of the incentives, coaches and players alike agree that there is value in delaying the process.
“Some players commit before they have a season in high school,” senior defender Maura Schwitter said. “You cannot figure out who’s going to be the best when they get to college when you’re recruiting freshmen. If I was getting recruited as a freshman, there’s a chance I wouldn’t have played lacrosse in college, because I just wasn’t the player that I am today, or that I was as a junior [in high school].”
Despite the overwhelming support for the tighter recruiting regulations among coaches and the greater lacrosse community alike, some people question the enforceability and efficacy of these new rules.
Although coaches can no longer speak to recruits via email, on the phone or in person by hosting unofficial visits on campus, they can still come into contact with recruits through their club coaches and invitations to developmental camps. Often, club coaches will forward emails directly to their players when a college coach expresses interest in them as a recruit. Skeptics argue that this legislation does nothing to stop college coaches from negotiating verbal commitments completely through a third party, such as a club coach.
But proponents of the new restrictions like Kimel argue that commitments without proper contact between recruits and coaches could be hazardous on both ends.
“As a coach, if I’m going to offer a prospective student athlete and their family an opportunity to be a part of our Duke lacrosse family without having ever met them face-to-face and had a conversation with them to get to know them better, then shame on me," Kimel said. "Likewise, as a parent, if you’re willing to work through a third party to broker a deal for your kid to go to a specific school without ever having sat down face-to-face with a college coach... if you’re going to be willing to take that kind of risk and chance with your child’s experience, shame on you.
"If people are going to go to that length and exploit that loophole, all the power to them. It would be very foolish on a number of fronts.”
With the new legislation effective immediately, only time will tell what influence these regulations will have on Division I lacrosse and the men’s and women’s programs at Duke. The men’s team secured the No. 1 recruiting class this year and has landed top-10 recruiting classes in each of the last seven years. Kimel reined in the eighth-best recruiting class of the year, featuring six top-100 recruits and two players in the top 50.
Both Kimel and Danowski claim to have avoided early recruiting before the NCAA Division I Council passed Proposal No. 2017-1, though freshman defender JT Giles-Harris committed to Danowski's program before his freshman year of high school after Danowski watched him in a club game.
But if both teams have found this level of success without resorting to cherry-picking most of their top talent from a young age, they will likely maintain their reputations as competitive programs into the future.
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