It’s Opening Day for recruiting for the high school class of 2026! (It’s hard to fathom, but we’re talking about the college class of 2030.)
June 15, 2024, otherwise known as the first day of allowable athletic recruiting for rising high school juniors by NCAA Division I and Division II coaches, is finally here. Today, student-athletes in the class of 2026 can both initiate and receive communications –including email, text messages, social media messages, phone calls, and video calls– with college coaches. They can also make verbal commitments for the 2026-27 school year.
NCAA Division III coaches are not constrained by this rule; they can make contact and recruit year-round.
As of today, D1 and D2 college coaches are allowed to:
- send recruiting materials and electronic correspondence (emails, text messages);
- receive incoming telephone calls;
- make outgoing telephone calls; and
- make verbal offers.
Contact between coaches and prospective student-athletes, whether off-campus or on-campus (on-campus visits include both official and unofficial visits) may not begin until August 1st.
The recruiting calendar has undergone several changes over the last several years, as the NCAA has tried to make the lives of prospective student-athletes and college coaches less stressful. Some of the modifications were meant to curb early recruiting (gone are the days when coaches were getting verbal commitments from 8th-graders); others were instituted to give coaches a break from year-round recruiting (there are now six weeks of “dead period” in which no recruiting can take place).
In April 2023, the NCAA created new rules for official and unofficial recruiting visits, doing away with the restriction that limited prospective student-athletes to a total of 5 official visits. Now, they can take as many official and unofficial visits as they like, although they are limited to one official visit per school unless there is a head coaching change.
The NCAA also instituted seven weeks of limited contact during the year, curtailing recruiting activity during National Letter of Intent (NLI) Signing Week in November and prohibiting all recruiting activity during the final week in August, the last two weeks in December, the first week in January, and two weeks in February. The new recruiting calendar was established both to protect prospective student-athletes from being pursued around the clock and to give coaches a break from the constant recruiting cycle.
Recruiting Dead Period
According to the NCAA: “A dead period is a period of time when it is not permissible to make in-person recruiting contacts or evaluations on or off the institution’s campus or to permit official or unofficial visits by prospective student-athletes to the institution’s campus. It remains permissible, however, for an institutional staff member to communicate with (other than in person) a prospective student-athlete during a dead period.”
- November 11-14, 2024
Recruiting Shutdown Periods
A shutdown period is a period of time when it is not permissible to do any recruiting whatsoever.
- One week in August (August 19-25, 2024)
- The final 14 days of December (December 18-31, 2024)
- The first week of January (January 1-7, 2025)
- The last two weeks are in February during the two most popular weeks for conference championships (February 10-23, 2025)
(NOTE: If you have a commitment to report, please send an email with a photo (landscape, or horizontal, looks best) and a quote to [email protected]. Do not leave it in the comment
recruiting already started for naia and d3 tho
And for those who might be starting on this path in the next year or two, June 15th is not the end all be all of the recruiting season. Unless you’re a top 200 recruit looking to go Power 4, it’s perfectly fine and normal to not be bombarded with calls, texts and emails on the 15th!