New NCAA Rules Designed To Slow College Baseball’s Recruiting Process

Image credit: (Photo by Tom DiPace)

The NCAA board of directors is prepared to this week approve a significant transformation of college baseball’s recruiting calendar, designed to slow down the recruiting process for high school players.

The new rules, which have already passed the Division I council and just need to clear the final step to be formally adopted, prohibit any communication between coaches and potential recruits (or anyone speaking on their behalf) until Aug. 1 before the player’s junior year of high school. Currently, coaches are prohibited from initiating contact with players before Sept. 1 of their junior year, but players are allowed to contact coaches. A similar rule has been enacted in sports such as lacrosse and softball in recent years.

Within the previous system, players routinely were offered scholarships and committed to schools as high school underclassmen—or even as middle schoolers. The new rules would eliminate that practice.

The recruitment of younger and younger players has drawn scrutiny from inside and outside college baseball. Few coaches ever liked the practice but felt like it was necessary to keep up with the competition.

“I think what we’re doing at this point is insane,” UC Santa Barbara coach Andrew Checketts said in 2017. “I find it hard to believe that 15-year-olds are mature enough, have been exposed to enough things to make major, life-changing decisions like where you go to school.”

In the more than five years since Checketts said that, the recruiting process in all sports, including baseball, has only accelerated. It’s gotten to the point where many outside of college baseball struggled to understand how recruiting had gotten to the point where players were committing before they ever played for their high school teams.

Ole Miss coach Mike Bianco said it wasn’t until 2004—more than a decade into his coaching career—that he first offered a scholarship to a player that wasn’t a senior and he remembers that required Dan McDonnell, then his recruiting coordinator, twisting his arm “several times.” Now Ole Miss, like every other SEC program, has multiple commits from 2026 graduates—this year’s high school freshmen.

While some players might be ready to make a decision as high school underclassmen, others felt pressured into a decision for fear of being left behind.

“I feel like with the way recruiting was going, guys were wanting and feeling pressure to commit earlier and earlier,” Kentucky coach Nick Mingione said. “Kids are committing because everyone else was doing it, not because it was right and they’re ready.”

The new rules are meant to ease the pressure on high school underclassmen, who won’t impact college programs for at least three years and are still early in their maturation as people. While the talent for some players who commit so young is obvious—Bobby Witt Jr. committed to Oklahoma before beginning his high school career and Dylan Crews committed to LSU after his freshman year, for instance—there is a real challenge to recruiting underclassmen. Evaluating players that young can lead to a bias toward players who mature earlier. Coaches also understand the practice is at least somewhat inefficient—the younger a player is, the more projection is required and the more likely it is that a player doesn’t develop, decommits or provides minimal impact in college. In the transfer portal era, it’s much easier to evaluate players who have already played college baseball and could help the team the following spring.

From the perspective of the players, a slower start to the process affords them more time to grow and develop as a person and as a player before they evaluate their college options. It also gives them a better idea of what a team’s roster might look like once they get to college. In today’s college baseball environment, where coaching staffs and rosters are turning over faster than ever, it’s unlikely that a player who committed as a freshman in high school would end up playing for the same coaching staff that recruited him once he arrived at school.

Multiple coaches said pitchers would be beneficiaries of the new rules because it should enable them to adopt a less onerous workload. A freshman in high school (especially in a warm weather state) might throw 30-40 innings during the spring and then another 30-40 in the summer. If he hasn’t gotten scholarship offers, or not the scholarship offers he wants, he might tack on another 20 innings in fall ball. He’d probably throw even more the following year as he took on more important roles for his teams. Those innings add up, as players chase the best offers they can get. If no offers can be given until their junior year, pitchers will be more empowered to build the best schedule for themselves and their arm care, not to make themselves as visible as possible.

The positives to the new rules are clear, but there are still real issues presented by them. The most common question coaches have about the rule change is what kind of teeth they’ll have. One recruiting coordinator at a Power Five program said in the day after the new rules were announced, he got 21 texts from travel ball coaches asking him how they could get around the new restrictions. While he told them he wouldn’t be breaking the rules, not everyone is going to feel similarly, especially if there aren’t harsh penalties for breaking the rules. Much like the rules that exist around tampering with players and the transfer portal, strict enforcement of the recruiting rules will be difficult for the NCAA, and coaches that are more inclined to operate in the gray area or work around the rules will continue to do so.

The rules don’t prohibit coaches from attending events where underclassmen are playing, and major conference recruiters will continue to attend tournaments for freshmen and sophomores in high school. Most coaches expect to spend less of their time on those classes, but they will have to at least minimally familiarize themselves with the underclassmen, so they are ready to jump into recruiting when the contact period opens. If coaches are still at events evaluating, there will still be pressure for players to play in them to be seen. These rules will also go into effect just as the volunteer coach designation is eliminated, allowing each program to include another coach in recruiting. With more coaches on the road, it’ll be easier than ever to devote time to scouting younger prospects.

Prospects are still allowed to attend camps at schools and those might become even more important under the new rules. If players are no longer allowed to communicate with coaches or take unofficial visits until their junior year, camps will provide their only opportunity to see campuses and talk with coaches. Even if coaches can’t offer scholarships in those scenarios, it won’t be hard for them to communicate their interest in a player while still operating within the rules.

The true impact of the rule changes will take a few years to be truly understood but it’s unlikely that the process of recruiting underclassmen is going away. It might be a little more limited and it will definitely be less open, but players and schools are still going to be sizing each other up long before Aug. 1 of a player’s junior year. The theory behind the new rules is clear and sound. But for it to work in reality, it will require everyone to step back and embrace a slower recruiting process.