A junior on your top team checks her phone between classes. Nothing from a coach. She opens Instagram and scrolls past three commitment graphics from players she faced this summer, one of them from a girl she outplayed in July. By practice she's distracted, short with a teammate, and rushing the passes she made easily all summer. Her skills are exactly what they were in July, and what has changed is whether she believes they count.
The Waiting Season
In lacrosse, NCAA Division I recruiting contact opens September 1 of a player's junior year, which means it opened last month for the class of 2028. Ricky Reyes, who directs CLA Lacrosse across the Carolinas, is watching that class move through it right now, and he names the part that makes this fall different from the ones directors grew up with: "social media has made it tough." The contact dates vary by sport, but every program with high school athletes has its own version of the waiting season: the window opens, a few players hear quickly, and the rest wait while the announcements pile up in their feed.
The odds are familiar to any director. The NCAA's 2024–25 estimates put the share of high school lacrosse players who go on to compete in the NCAA at 14.7% for boys and 14.0% for girls, and the share reaching Division I at 3.4% and 6.3%. Most of your juniors will wait a long time, or hear nothing from the programs they've been picturing. What the percentages leave out is what the wait does to a sixteen-year-old. Ricky describes it from the athlete's side: "waking up hoping the phone call rings and it's not ringing and you're scrolling Instagram, you're seeing all these people you know committing." He calls it "a self-worth thing that we have to navigate."
The standard response to recruiting stress is more information: a timeline, a profile checklist, a showcase calendar. Families need all of it, and all of it helps. The limit is that information addresses the process, while the October injury lands on the athlete's sense of whether she's good enough, and a timeline never reaches that.
Three Things That Help
1: Start the Education Years Before It Matters
Ricky sees recruiting anxiety "bleeding down younger and younger," with middle school families filling calendars with events because they're afraid of falling behind. That fear deserves a real answer rather than a dismissal, and the answer is earlier, plainer education. CLA starts in eighth and ninth grade with a low-pressure look at what's coming. By freshman and sophomore year it gets direct: webinars, calls, and one-on-one conversations that give athletes an unvarnished picture of college lacrosse, from early-morning workouts five days a week to rosters of thirty to sixty players, scholarship money that is minimal next to football or basketball, and the real chance of not playing all four years. Ricky calls the approach a "reverse sell," and he pairs it with one message families hear often: the most important thing is that the kid keeps loving training, because "at the next level, whether it's high school or college, 70% of it is training."
The payoff arrives in October. An athlete who understood the odds and the grind before the window opened can read a slow fall as one stretch of a long process rather than a verdict on her. In Ricky's words, "it's a marathon that kids want to be a sprint." A workable cadence for most programs is one session per grade band per year, with the junior-year version moved to one-on-one conversations.
2: Ask the Athlete Alone
CLA has a dedicated recruiting director for its boys' and girls' programs, and every quarter players fill out a questionnaire. It asks which region they picture themselves in, what they want to study, how their grades look, which coaches have reached out, and how they rank lacrosse level, academic reputation, and social life against each other. The detail that makes it work is who fills it out. As Ricky puts it, "we tell the parents that we want the kids to do this on their own."
The reason is practical rather than adversarial. With a parent in the room, answers drift toward what the athlete thinks the parent hopes to hear, and academic prestige lands at the top of the list whether or not the athlete actually ranks it there. The parent's hopes come from love and from a real sense of what's at stake, and the questionnaire gives the athlete a way to bring their own priorities into that conversation, so they can tell their parents, in Ricky's phrasing, "this is actually what I want out of the experience."
The quarterly record also gives staff something concrete to hold up against a decision while it can still change. Ricky describes a CLA player whose answers pointed one direction while he leaned toward a demanding, high-profile Division I program. Staff asked him directly whether the pull was the name. He went anyway, and after his first fall semester he reached out to say he was thinking about transferring. Keep the form to one page, run it once a quarter, and have the recruiting lead review each response within a week.
3: Give the Closed Door Somewhere to Go
When a target program stops responding or says no, the athlete needs the next option named quickly, in person, by an adult she trusts. Ricky's message to kids in that moment is that one door closing leaves a set of real opportunities ahead of them, and CLA backs it up with specifics: other programs, other divisions, and college club lacrosse, which Ricky's staff actively recommend to athletes who want a big school, its social life, and the game.
For the athletes who won't play in college, which by the NCAA's numbers is most of them, the program also has to answer the question a parent asked at a CLA meeting this fall: "what's the point of club lacrosse past that?" Ricky's answer, which he later turned into an article of his own, is that club is where kids learn "how to handle success, failure, adversity on a lacrosse field in a controlled setting," along with accountability, what it means to let teammates down, and how to play for a coach they don't always agree with. Say that to families before the window opens rather than after, so the athlete who never gets the call still has a reason to be on your field next spring.
The Afternoon After the Feed
Everything here runs on three commitments: education that starts earlier than feels necessary, the athlete's own answers on paper, and a staff that treats the waiting season as part of athlete wellbeing rather than a side project for the recruiting lead.
Your junior is going to check her phone again tomorrow between classes. Make sure the conversation she has with your staff that afternoon carries more weight than the feed did.
