This article appears in the April edition of US Lacrosse Magazine, which mails to US Lacrosse members later this week. Don’t get the mag? Join US Lacrosse today to start your subscription.

Hannah Nielsen had a busy September.

The second-year Michigan women’s lacrosse coach juggled the start of fall practices with contacting and bringing in prospective student-athletes from the high school class of 2020, but she came away feeling good about the results and hopeful that model remains in place.

“The fall was a little hectic. That’s the feedback we got from coaches,” said Nielsen, a member of the IWLCA’s NCAA Division I Legislation Committee. “Everyone was scrambling to visit in the fall. Most people probably preferred that to having a crazy, crazy summer and not being able to fully evaluate kids and having to rush into decisions.”

Division I men’s and women’s lacrosse coaches are concerned now that the rush will return earlier if a new NCAA proposal passes barely two years after lacrosse fought to push contact with prospects back to Sept. 1 of their junior year of high school.

“You’re making tens of thousands of student-athletes’ lives harder,” said Penn men’s head coach Mike Murphy, the vice president of the IMLCA. 

Authored by the NCAA Student Athlete Experience Committee, Proposal 2018-93 would permit phone calls, emails and text messaging to begin June 15 at the end of a PSA’s sophomore year and visits would be permitted Aug. 1. The NCAA Division I Council will meet April 17-19 to vote on it.

“I was surprised and I was disappointed given how much work we put into our proposal a few years ago,” said Duke women’s head coach Kerstin Kimel, the chair of the IWLCA committee. “Our group really brought some awareness to the issue certainly in our sport, but it also opened eyes to the problems other sports are dealing with in regards to early recruiting. I wasn’t surprised that they tackled it, but I was disappointed that the NCAA is too quick to generalize with one size fits all.”

The new proposal includes all NCAA sports but exempts football, men’s and women’s basketball, and men’s ice hockey. Baseball added an amendment to be excluded from the proposal, and on Feb. 1 the Atlantic Coast Conference submitted Proposal 2018-93-2 that would exempt lacrosse and keep Sept. 1 as the initial date of any contact.

“To have the ACC amendment in the cycle is a huge step in the right direction,” said Samantha Ekstrand, legal counsel for the IWLCA and IMLCA. “We want to give Sept. 1 a chance to work, and the NCAA is preempting that under the guise of wanting all sports lined up. But earlier is not the answer.”

The high school class of 2021 would be the first without extensive contact with college coaches before Sept. 1. The class of 2019 was largely committed, and even many in the class of 2020 had committed before the rule changed, though there were enough still not committed to give coaches a taste of the future.

“We’ve loved to be able to watch and evaluate in the summer without the pressure of having to call them right after a tournament, get to know them on the phone and scramble to have them visit,” Nielsen said. “By the time they were able to visit, they were mature, they were able to hold conversations, they knew a bit more about what they wanted in a college experience.”

Lacrosse coaches are united impressively in wanting to keep the Sept. 1 contact date. When the IWLCA was surveyed in November, all but seven coaches were in favor of it. When the IMLCA met in December, 100 percent of respondents were in favor of keeping the Sept. 1 date and not moving it earlier to align with other sports.

“We just did this,” Murphy said. “We went through a lot of work over a lot of years to get this in place, and now before we even really see the effects of it, the NCAA is going to change it. There’s no logic to them changing it in our sport when they have other sports that are not within this change.”

Proposal 2018-93 would compromise the evaluation period, Nielsen said.

“You’re back into rushing mode,” she said. “No longer can you go to a tournament and go back on a Monday and talk the tournament over with your staff and create your list. Everything has to have a timeline on it, and you have to start making calls because you don’t know what the next school is going to be doing.”

Coaches fear PSAs will rush to commit to colleges even though they can’t visit until after the lacrosse dead period of Aug. 1-15.

“You have to go into a classroom and feel like, I can do this, and get a sense of the environment,” Kimel said. “That’s how it should be everywhere. Kids should go to practice or watch training. Kids should be able to spend some time with the team to get an idea of what the team culture is like. That’s not happening in August.”

For recruits, the June 15 first contact date could cause a distraction academically in parts of the country where they are taking final exams, and athletically affect those still in season-ending tournaments. They may be fielding offers two months before official visits are permitted.

“Do kids accept offers on the phone, without meeting face to face?” Murphy said. “The way we have it now is so clean that the staggered start would convolute things a lot.”

Splitting first contact and visitation into two dates would also make it more difficult for compliance officers to regulate recruiting, coaches contend. And if the new proposal passes, it likely would go into effect immediately, leaving both PSAs and coaches scrambling just as they were adjusting to their Sept. 1 rule.

“Nowhere do you put a policy in place for one year without seeing it through,” Kimel said. “This is the first year where we’re really going to see how it plays out.”