Freshman Year Isn't Too Early — For These Three Things

Somebody will tell you that freshman year is too late to start thinking about college lacrosse, and somebody else will tell you it's far too early to be thinking about it at all.

The second group is closer to right, with an asterisk.

No Division I men's coach may initiate contact with your goalie until the Wednesday after Labor Day at the start of his junior year — that's the rule as of August 2026, replacing the old September 1 date. Two more years of nobody calling. So the recruiting anxiety industry has nothing to sell a freshman family that's worth buying.

Three things do start now. All three are free, none of them involve a recruiting service, and all three are worth more than anything you could spend money on this year.

The short version

One: the transcript. Ninth-grade grades count toward the core GPA that decides NCAA eligibility. The lacrosse season is practice. The report card is permanent.

Two: the film habit. Not a highlight reel — just saving full-game footage somewhere organised, starting now.

Three: the body. High school is the first year of real strength work, and doing it properly at fourteen is what makes a seventeen-year-old durable.

That's the list. Everything else can wait two years without costing him anything.

Why these three, and not the rest

The transcript, because it's the only one with a deadline he can't move. Division I requires 16 core courses, a 2.3 core-course GPA, and ten of those sixteen completed before senior year. The NCAA also permanently dropped the test-score requirement, which means the transcript now carries the entire academic case by itself. A rough freshman year is a mathematical drag on an average that can't be recalculated later, and it's the single most common avoidable problem I see in recruiting. The full version is here.

Film, because the raw material has to exist before the reel can. In eleventh grade he'll need clips, and the families who struggle are the ones starting from nothing. A parent filming from high in the bleachers a few times a season, saving files with the date and opponent in the name, is doing the whole job. It also makes him better right now — watching his own positioning is one of the fastest coaching tools available, and it's the thing coaches actually read in a reel later.

The body, because ninth grade is where the training changes. This program holds weight training back until high school on purpose, and then introduces it under strict form-before-load rules with real coaching. A goalie who spends ninth and tenth grade building a base — hips, posterior chain, single-leg strength, shoulder health — arrives in eleventh grade able to train hard without breaking. One who skips it spends eleventh grade getting hurt.

Suggestions on what you can do

Book twenty minutes with the school counselor this fall. Ask for the school's NCAA-approved course list, and map the four-year sequence against the 10/7 rule. It's the highest-value meeting available to a freshman family and almost nobody takes it.

Put the football-field version of a filming routine in place. Phone, tripod, high and wide, full games. One cheap tripod solves this for four years.

Get him into a real weight room with a real coach. School strength staff, a qualified trainer, or a program that supervises properly. What matters at fourteen is technique and consistency, not load, and bad early lifting is worse than none.

Have him write down what he's aiming at. Not colleges — targets. A save percentage, a clear rate, a lift number, a GPA. Young athletes who track things tend to keep doing them, and by eleventh grade he'll have three years of evidence about himself.

Let him start the outreach when he's ready, usually tenth. He can email coaches before they're allowed to reply, and the ones who are interested read and file them. It should be him writing, not you — coaches can tell, and it matters to them.

And keep the fall multi-sport if he wants it. Ninth grade is not too late for a second sport, and it remains one of the better predictors of an athlete still playing at eighteen.

A few things worth avoiding

Try not to buy recruiting services this year. There's nothing for them to do that you can't do free, and the two years of subscription would pay for a very good goalie coach.

Go easy on the college conversation at dinner. A fourteen-year-old who hears about college lacrosse three times a week starts playing for it instead of playing, and that's a slow way to ruin the thing he liked.

Try not to specialise now because somebody said he has to. The rules just moved contact later, not earlier, and nothing about a freshman season is being evaluated.

And don't let him skip the base work for more shots. Every goalie wants to face shots, and ninth and tenth grade are the two years where the unglamorous strength work pays the most.

The version worth remembering

Freshman year is not about being seen. Nobody is looking, and the rules make sure of it.

It's about arriving at that Wednesday in eleventh grade with a transcript that gives a coach no reason to hesitate, footage that shows he does the job properly, and a body that can handle what comes next.

Three things, all free, all boring. Your young athlete will be very glad of them in two years.

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Ninth grade is a specific phase in the program — the first year of real strength work, with form-before-load rules and a schedule built around a student's week. Three real days of a fifth-grade week are open on the site, no signup. Take a look at the free week.

Coach Greg — LAX Goalie Hub

General information from a coach, not medical advice. Strength training for a growing athlete should be supervised by a qualified coach — if you have concerns about load, pain or injury, talk to a qualified clinician who can examine your athlete. Confirm current eligibility rules with the NCAA Eligibility Center.