Open Contact Season Begins for High School Seniors on July 1

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Beginning Wednesday, July 1st, NCAA Division I college coaches are thrown into a scramble. As they try to juggle their summer campers, today is the first day where coaches are allowed to contact prospective swimmers entering their senior year in high school over the phone, electronically, or face-to-face without (much) limit.

Read more about July 1 from Rick Paine, here.

This year’s open contact period has a very different feel than in the past for the sport of swimming, due to a huge number of early commits who have already made their college decisions before taking official visits.

There’s always a handful of swimmers who make their choices before the formality of the recruiting process, and that’s especially true in pre-Olympic years where swimmers want to be focused on the Olympic Trials rather than on recruiting trips.

But this year, even in that context, is at best an outlier, if not a paradigm-shifter.

For a true superstar swimmer like class of ’15 senior Katie Ledecky to commit to a top-5 program like Stanford early is one message. She would have had plenty of interaction with the Stanford swimmers and coaches at national level meets previously.

But when non-traditional national powers like Akron start getting commits in June, or when a very good, but not Ledecky-level, commit like Kennedy Lohman makes a decision to move across the country from Kentucky to Arizona before she’s even allowed to take an official visit there, the pressure suddenly ramps up. When a

Don’t expect the trend to end, at least this year, either. There are many coaches who are notorious for pressuring athletes into early commitments with “48 hour” scholarship offers, and now with the support of two dozen or so pre-July 1 commits, they’ll have even more ammunition with which to pencil their programs on the transcripts of the top senior swimmers in the country.

Along with a trend of earlier-and-earlier verbal commitments, there’s the potential for more-and-more re-commitments. This is a phenomenon that has only recently begun to bite swimming harder, but is rather commonplace in major sports like football and basketball (where, admittedly, there’s much more on the line). Until National Letters of Intent are signed (which opens on November 11th this year for swimmers), the commitments are non-binding.

With the expectations of earlier-and-earlier commitments, athletes, coaches, and fans will have to get used to the expectation of more swimmers changing their minds. This doesn’t mean we should start to expect to see them in droves, but our prediction is that there will be more in the coming three months than we’re used to seeing.

Grab your popcorn and get ready to ride the wave. SwimSwam’s official recruiting coverage coordinator Anne Lepesant is ready, and it’s time for the dog-and-pony show to begin.