There have been over 1300 Division One games played to date and the final 18 teams have been selected for the NCAA tournament but come Nov 13, there will begin National Letter of Intent signings providing teams with new players to replace graduating seniors and more. The recruiting process has no doubt been stressful but in reality many pre-NLI commitments have already been made as long as a year ago.
The NLI is just the end of the process and no doubt head coaches already know what 80-90 percent of their class will look like. Although they are prohibited by NCAA regulations from announcing or disclosing recruit names until after the NLI is signed, recruits themselves, or their clubs have already revealed the plans of these recruits. ( I guess this is another example of NCAA minions discovering useless work for an industry of compliance administrators…but that’s a subject for a whole new article. Coach K from Duke was dinged last week by NCAA for revealing the name of a recruit by him in Chicago. The recruit had announced publicly for months he has committed to Duke).
It is easy enough to find the names of recruits, even in field hockey, through Club news releases or services such has Max Sports. So armed with my trusty computer, without relying on information from any Patriot League school or coach I will as I did last year report on commitments for these League schools. Foreign commitments are more difficult to find and they tend to commit later on in the process.
Lafayette has been hard at work replacing an excellent senior class and as you will see have commitments from Massachusetts to Texas. But I will also be looking at all Patriot League commitments in the coming weeks.
Meanwhile American University will be competing in the opening round of the NCAA tournament. They are playing Fairfield at Fairfield tomorrow and I expect an easy win for the Eagles. They will then return to Conn. on Friday for a much tougher game with UCONN.
Lafayette College Field Hockey 