When college coaches can actually contact you

Every recruiting conversation starts with the same question, and almost every parent gets a different answer depending on which page they land on. Part of the reason is that the rules genuinely changed — twice, in the last three years, in ways that pull football and lacrosse in opposite directions. The other part is that a lot of what is published has simply gone stale and nobody took it down.

So this guide does one thing: it states the current dates and shows you where they come from. If a date below disagrees with something you have read elsewhere, check the date on that other page.

Football

Football This is the one people get wrong most often, and the error runs in a direction that costs families time. A number of well-known recruiting sites — and, awkwardly, several university compliance pages that were never updated — still say September 1 of junior year for recruiting materials and electronic correspondence, with off-campus contact from July 1 after junior year.

That pairing was correct around 2021. It is not correct now. Football used to hold an exception to the NCAA's general June 15 rule; that exception was removed, and football now falls under the general rule with no carve-out at all. In the current bylaws, Bylaw 13.4.1 (recruiting materials and electronic correspondence) and Bylaw 13.1.3.1 (telephone calls) both set June 15 at the conclusion of sophomore year, and both list their exceptions explicitly — baseball, men's and women's lacrosse, softball, men's and women's basketball, men's ice hockey, men's wrestling. Football is not among them.

The dates that are football-specific are the in-person ones:

Off-campus contact moved to January 1 of junior year under the Football Comprehensive Recruiting Model, adopted in April 2023. It is limited: two recruiting opportunities per contact period, of which only one may be somewhere other than the athlete's high school.

Lacrosse

Lacrosse Men's lacrosse ran on September 1 of junior year for years, and that date is burned into how club coaches and families talk about recruiting. It changed. Adopted 29 June 2026 and effective 1 August 2026, the trigger is now the Wednesday immediately following Labor Day at 7:00 a.m. of the athlete's junior year. The stated reasoning was to stop families spending Labor Day weekend waiting on a clock, and to end the midnight phone calls.

Unlike football, lacrosse's date is a single gate covering nearly everything at once: off-campus contact, phone calls in both directions, recruiting materials, official visits, athletics-department involvement in unofficial visits, and recruiting conversations at college camps.

Lacrosse Girls' lacrosse did not follow the men's change and stays on September 1 of junior year — but it now carries a clock it did not have before: 12:00 p.m. Eastern, not midnight. For the class of 2028 that is Tuesday, September 1, 2026 at noon ET.

Division II and Division III

Both are far more relaxed than DI, and for most Georgia athletes they are the more realistic target. Division II coaches may call and email at any time, with off-campus contact and official visits from June 15 after sophomore year. Division III has no communication restriction at all; official visits begin January 1 of junior year. If a DIII coach emails your sophomore, that is normal and permitted.

What you can do before the gate opens

The date restricts what a coach may do. It restricts almost nothing about what a family may do, and this is where the months before junior year actually get used:

• Coaches can watch. Games, showcases, camps — there is no restriction on evaluation. A coach standing on your sideline in tenth grade is allowed to be there.
• You can email coaches. Nothing stops an athlete sending film and a schedule. The coach may not be able to reply substantively yet; the message still lands and gets filed.
• You can visit campuses on your own. For lacrosse, the athletics department cannot be involved before the date. Walking the campus is not an athletics-department visit.
• Camps and prospect days are open. This is the main legal channel for a coach to see an underclassman up close, which is why they exist in the volume they do.
• Your high school and club coaches can talk to them. Before the date a college coach's questions are limited, but the relationship between your coach and theirs is the channel that does the most work.

One more thing that changed

The National Letter of Intent was eliminated by the NCAA in October 2024. Athletes now sign a financial aid agreement instead. Parents and local coverage still say “signed his NLI” — the document no longer exists, and the distinction matters if anyone hands you paperwork using the old name.