Lars Tiffany remembers when he was trying out for the freshman football team as a ninth-grader at LaFayette (N.Y.) High School. He still had braces and his stature wasn’t likely to strike fear into any opponents. He readily admits, “I was intimidated.”

He made the team, the freshman team as you recall, as a third string safety. “LaFayette is a really small school and this was not high-level football,” Tiffany said. Two years later he was a varsity starter and he developed into a great all-around athlete, eventually serving as a two-year captain on the lacrosse team at Brown.

If Tiffany’s career would have been based on what college coaches saw of him as a high school freshman, there probably wouldn’t have been much of a future. But that’s the nature of college lacrosse recruiting these days. As of early February, Recruiting Rundown listed nearly 100 high school freshman boys’ lacrosse players already committed to college programs.

Twenty colleges were on the list for Class of 2020 commitments, but you’ll find some bluebloods missing — including Duke, Notre Dame and Virginia, where Tiffany is in his first season as head coach after leading Brown to the NCAA semifinals last season.

“I don’t want to recruit prospects I can’t call,” Tiffany said, referring to the NCAA ban on coaches contacting prospective student-athletes before Sept. 1 of their junior year of high school. It’s a ban with little teeth as the student-athletes can contact the coaches themselves, and club and high school coaches help facilitate the dialog between coach and player.

“We’ve lost some good freshman prospects and we’ve told them, it’s just not time,” Tiffany said. “We need more time to get to know them – what kind of student they are, what kind of player they are, and what kind of young man they are.”

He looks back to his own past as a ninth-grade athlete, and his experience as a coach at Brown. Last year's Brown team featured nine USILA All-Americans, including Tewaaraton winner Dylan Molloy. None of them were Under Armour All-Americans as high school players.

“We needed to wait for academic reasons at Brown, and even with being patient in the recruiting process, we found that the prospects that committed earlier were not necessarily better than guys we were picking up later,” Tiffany said.

So when Tiffany got the Virginia job, he made the decision not to recruit freshmen. He’s even very selective in looking at sophomores, but not everyone loves what he’s doing.

“A lot of parents and fans smile when they hear this, and say, ‘That’s great. We need to slow this down,’” Tiffany said. “But when they hear I’m going to go after kids that have verbally committed elsewhere – now they pause. But the two go hand in hand. There are going to be late bloomers, but I’m not going to fill a class with 10-11 late bloomers every year. If they’ve shown interest in Virginia and we’re interested in them, we’re going to go after them whether the recruits have made a verbal commitment or not. They can say no, and that’s fine, but we’re going to give them another option.”

Tiffany’s approach is one way to attack the current early recruiting environment without the need for any further NCAA legislation. Existing NCAA rules do not allow a player or school to enter into a binding agreement until November of their senior year. But lacrosse coaches historically, on both the men’s and women’s sides, have honored verbal commitments by players and ceased contact. The net result has been that the process moves up earlier every year.

In April, the NCAA DI Council will vote on a proposal that would ban all forms of contact, even those initiated by the student-athlete, between college lacrosse coaches and prospects before Sept. 1 of their junior year.

“A lot of families, club coaches and high school coaches are OK with our recruiting process if it’s a way to counter early recruiting,” Tiffany said. “They don’t necessarily like breaking commitments — your word is your word — but the early recruiting beast is so distasteful, they’re OK with it.”

Tiffany is not the first, and by no means the only coach doing this, but it comes at a potential cost by damaging friendships within the collegiate coaching ranks.

“I don’t relish recruiting from other college programs that already have commitments,” Tiffany said. “I’m just trying to do my job the best way that I can. Not only does the philosophy of not making 14- and 15-year-olds make commitments feel right, it feels right competitively.”