Johns Hopkins 2020

[DocBarrister]

Priority should be given to providing high school student athletes as much choice and flexibility as possible. Young people will change their minds from time to time and should be afforded the opportunity to do so. I’m sure many coaches are annoyed by that, but their wishes should not take priority.

Early recruiting and commitments were never a bad thing for coaches and programs, despite the unfounded assertions to the contrary. It was a bad thing for the kids.

DocBarrister

[44WeWantMore]

First 2021 from Ty Xanders

"IL’s No. 57 junior Grant Litchfield, D, Belmont Hill (Mass.) /
@LXCMinutemen has announced his commitment to
@JHUmenslacrosse. Mean and athletic cover man from the ISL; decided pre-rules in 2017."

Okay, I feel like I really should know, but... Would someone please explain "decided pre-rules in 2017" and comment if Ty's writing was imprecise in this case? Thank you in advance.

Pretty sure this just means he had made a verbal/unofficial commitment in 2017 before the rule change prohibited contact with schools until Sept. 1 of junior year. And now that it's Sept. 1 of his junior year, he's making that commitment "official." Maryland, Duke, UNC, Cornell, Ohio State, Penn, and Michigan all had verbal commitments from 2021 players before the April 2017 rule change. Apparently we had one too (Litchfield), but nobody knew about it.

But this verbal still not a hard commit right, until they sign the NLI's their senior year? I guess a good example would be BJ Farrare, he was a 3-4 year Loyola ER recruit until he switched a couple days before NLI day after receiving an offer to play football and lacrosse at Upenn (heck i would switch too for an Ivy degree). Or our 2019 recruit Carson Raney as a tough D guy but last second he switched to OSU.

Because that's what im worried about the most for both Loyola and Hopkins's 2020 class. Hopkins has the best class in the country with their guys coming in and Loyola's is projected to be the #8 class once IL gets their star ratings right, but all of these verbals could change from today up until November 13th.

And, as I understand it, only those receiving athletic scholarships need to even sign a NLI.
https://www.ncsasports.org/recruiting/m ... cholarship

Of course, I presume that essentially all difference-makers at D-I lacrosse programs (excluding the Ivys, Service Academies, and Hobart, last I heard) receive some athletic scholarship money.

[MDlaxfan76]

Reclassifying is pervasive in the private/prep school lacrosse scene. Athletes often repeat 8th grade before the clock for high school participation years in some leagues kicks in. There is also pre-first in a lot of the private schools. You will often find private school players are one to two years older than their public school counter parts in the Baltimore-DC lacrosse scene.

The Friends School in B'more has this. They'll even put kids who went to their kindergarten into it as "not being ready for first grade at Friends".

Yup, the timing cut-off is different. For those on the bubble, this is primarily a judgment about how the child is maturing intellectually and perhaps more importantly socially.

My son applied for pre-first well earlier than he would have normally been eligible for first grade. The question was between another year of kindergarten or pre-first. He was turned down at Gilman as a little guy, but accepted at Calvert( both pre-first programs, Calvert being typically the tougher program to qualify for.) Gilman said that he’d become distracted during the interview process. When I discussed this gently, quite surprised as I knew he was intellectually quite prepared, I learned that while waiting his turn he’d built a quite elaborate construction out of building blocks. He went on and on about it. Eventually I asked him about his discussion with the teacher and becoming distracted. He said that another kid had come over to the blocks and kicked them over, in his view. Well, their judgment might well have been best suited at that moment as Calvert’s process was more regimented than Gilman at that age, so he thrived at Calvert. But later when he moved to Gilman, same class, he was clearly superbly prepared and fit in well.

My son had no siblings, so had spent his early years with tons of adult attention and discussions, so his social development was indeed somewhat restricted at that point. Made sense to me.

My point is that the schools are focused on whether the kid is truly ready for their program, not having anything to do with athletics. Perhaps some parents are thinking about those aspects and resist offers to start a kid with an older group. But that’s not the case for the vast majority of the parents or the schools. Pre-first is seen as essentially an accelerated kindergarten experience, making sense mostly for bright kids ready for more challenge but not quite full pace. More structured, less free play, curriculum introducing various skills in more of a class room setting. But each school has their own approach and so the ‘fit’ is important.

[OCanada]

WWM. - “Some” Money is a good choice of words. I haven’t paid much attention lately but at o e point there were quite a few schools that did not fully fund their programs. That is, they didn’t offer the full 12.6 athletic scholarships. ND was in that category for a long time. Then they stepped it up. The LOI is or was only for kids getting scholarships

[51percentcorn]

Early recruiting and commitments were never a bad thing for coaches and programs,

Hard to convey how incorrect and absurd this statement is

Hopkins has done its share of it: Brendan Grimes was originally an OSU commit before switching to Hopkins. I don't know if that was player or team initiated, but either way, he was only verbally committed and thus free for other teams to talk to. I suspect there will be at least a couple big-name switches in the 2020 class before the NLI date.

Now do I actually know for a fact of what I am about to type is 100% accurate - no - but what I believe is that DP has a pretty strict honor code to not directly mess with any player that has verballed to another school. I have a concrete example. I was privy - through a fall tournament - that a pretty highly regarded player that had committed to another BIG school was very interested in re-opening his recruiting. I e-mailed Dave and he was very gracious and kind in his reply and what he said was if the player was interested in Hopkins he could reach out to him but that Hopkins would not contact any player that was "committed" to another school. Others may have different stories - that is mine. I have to say I kind of believed him. So maybe Grimes reached out to Hopkins first or Petro asked Boys Latin staff if he was still an OSU commit - I don't know. Switches of commitments don't have to be nefarious affairs. For the record, I don't like poaching - it has a disagreeable "aura" - but again this may be one time that if all the other Johnnies are jumping off the bridge maybe you have to consider it - despite what your mother says.

[Henpecked]

You can say a lot of things about Coach Pietramala (stubborn, ornery, angry, petulant-at times), but you cannot say that he isn't an honorable person. I have heard three separate stories about Petro handling transfers and de-commits. He leaves it up to the student to contact him and has kept things confidential to give the kids some breathing room to make informed decisions. No deadlines, no ultimatums and no promises or confidences broken.

That is more than I can say for many coaches out there. No names of course. But we all know who they are.

[WOMBAT, Mod Emeritus]

Corrigan

[Homer]

Early recruiting and commitments were never a bad thing for coaches and programs, despite the unfounded assertions to the contrary.

DocBarrister

This would be very difficult to study analytically in any detailed way. You'd need to define what you mean by "early," when the timeline kept moving up virtually every year; you'd need to assign everybody a date of commitment, while figuring out how to deal with the fact that some were publicized immediately and some clearly not; you'd come up against a ton of confounding factors, e.g. that the programs that were aggressively early weren't a random sample but tended to have certain similarities from a recruiting standpoint.

So in THAT sense, I guess you can say the claim that ER was/has been/is a net negative for the programs most heavily involved is "unfounded," insofar as the work to prove it statistically hasn't been done and probably never will. But in that sense, Doc's assertion that ER *wasn't* "a bad thing for coaches and programs" is utterly unfounded as well.

From an informal observational standpoint, though, Doc's claim seems obviously wrong. At least, it seems possible to point to certain specific programs whose involvement in ER looks in hindsight like a major strategic mistake, and that list would include the Johns Hopkins Blue Jays.

[DocBarrister]

Please ... uber early recruiter Joe Breschi led his team to 9 consecutive NCAA tournaments in the tough ACC and the national championship in 2016.

Early recruiter Don Starsia won a national championship in 2011.

Even early recruiter Dave Pietramala led Hopkins in the past decade to 9 of 10 NCAA tournaments, several quarterfinals, and the Final Four in 2015. That’s below “standard” for Johns Hopkins ... Golden Age for the vast majority of college lacrosse programs.

The notion that early recruiting hurt lacrosse coaches and their programs is one of the most intellectually lazy assertions in the sport. The coaches who practiced early recruitment did it for one reason ... it gave them a competitive advantage. Late bloomer Pat Spencer was the exception; early bloomers like Joey Epstein were (and are) the rule.

If early recruiting regularly backfired on the coaches practicing it, the NCAA wouldn’t have needed a rule banning it. The coaches would have stopped doing it. Fact is, the most talented lacrosse players often show their talent early ... that’s why early recruiting worked. Only an idiot coach would rely on finding the uncommon late bloomer. Most future college lacrosse stars make their presence known quite early.

I’m glad early recruiting in lacrosse has been put to an end. It’s one of the rare NCAA moves that has put student athletes before the programs recruiting them.

DocBarrister

[Lenwood117]

Please ... uber early recruiter Joe Breschi led his team to 9 consecutive NCAA tournaments in the tough ACC and the national championship in 2016.

Early recruiter Don Starsia won a national championship in 2011.

Even early recruiter Dave Pietramala led Hopkins in the past decade to 9 of 10 NCAA tournaments, several quarterfinals, and the Final Four in 2015. That’s below “standard” for Johns Hopkins ... Golden Age for the vast majority of college lacrosse programs.

The notion that early recruiting hurt lacrosse coaches and their programs is one of the most intellectually lazy assertions in the sport. The coaches who practiced early recruitment did it for one reason ... it gave them a competitive advantage. Late bloomer Pat Spencer was the exception; early bloomers like Joey Epstein were (and are) the rule.

If early recruiting regularly backfired on the coaches practicing it, the NCAA wouldn’t have needed a rule banning it. The coaches would have stopped doing it. Fact is, the most talented lacrosse players often show their talent early ... that’s why early recruiting worked. Only an idiot coach would rely on finding the uncommon late bloomer. Most future college lacrosse stars make their presence known quite early.

I’m glad early recruiting in lacrosse has been put to an end. It’s one of the rare NCAA moves that has put student athletes before the programs recruiting them.

DocBarrister

Yes Epstein worked out, but so have more then a handful that so far have not.

[Homer]

Please ... uber early recruiter Joe Breschi led his team to 9 consecutive NCAA tournaments in the tough ACC and the national championship in 2016.

Oooooh, I see what we're doing here! Quantifying ER's effects is hard, so instead we'll just call anybody who ever did ER an "early recruiter" and describe their career achievements regardless of date, without making *any attempt at all* to figure out what role ER played and whether the effect was positive or negative.

I don't want to take anything away from UNC's title in 2016. But looking at the bigger picture of program trajectory, that team was 8-6 in the regular season and just scraped into the tournament after having been the #3 seed the year before. The past four years (including the title team) UNC has a regular-season record of 31-27 (.534), as compared with 45-15 (.750) from 2012-15. Since the 2016 championship their NCAA record is 0-1. As the calendar has shifted earlier, the trajectory for the program with arguably the most exposure has trended significantly downward.

Early recruiter Don Starsia won a national championship in 2011.

So: Starsia, riding a continuous run of success going back to the 90s, wins a title in 2011 with kids acquired before ER's real post-2010 ramp-up. Results then fall off a cliff over the following 5 years, before a new staff comes in and is able to mitigate ER's most significant drawbacks by clearing out the pipeline -- something grudgingly accepted when it comes with a coaching change, but couldn't ever become a program's routine MO. So we've established that "Do some ER, wreck the program, fire the coach, then eventually win later on" can be a viable strategy.

Even early recruiter Dave Pietramala led Hopkins in the past decade to 9 of 10 NCAA tournaments, several quarterfinals, and the Final Four in 2015. That’s below “standard” for Johns Hopkins ... Golden Age for the vast majority of college lacrosse programs.

Since this literally says that this ER-heavy program got worse during the ER era, I think further discussion would be inappropriate. Better just to stand back and contemplate the majestic audacity of the mind that can somehow construe this as a point in his favor.

The notion that early recruiting hurt lacrosse coaches and their programs is one of the most intellectually lazy assertions in the sport. The coaches who practiced early recruitment did it for one reason ... it gave them a competitive advantage.

I would indeed assume that was their intent. Virtually everything coaches do happens because they *believe* it will make their team more competitive. The question is whether that strategy has proved, in actual fact, to be a successful one.

Late bloomer Pat Spencer was the exception; early bloomers like Joey Epstein were (and are) the rule.

Look, the whole premise of ER, at the most abstract level, is that you're trading high upside off against higher variance. Saying "But you'll get a few really good players!" is just describing one side of that gambit without even looking at the other side of the ledger in terms of all the kids you bring in who don't pan out. It's like saying you got a great deal on your new Mercedes without actually having any clue what you paid for it.

If early recruiting regularly backfired on the coaches practicing it, the NCAA wouldn’t have needed a rule banning it. The coaches would have stopped doing it.

Unlike every other argument put forward here, this one is at least not incoherent on its own terms. But it's an oversimplification: once aggressive ER had yanked the calendar earlier, every program had to respond to some degree; sticking to the traditional timeline would've meant going unacceptably late, even if from a pure talent-evaluation standpoint it was still the optimal strategy. But even if it were the case that doing *some* recruiting *somewhat* earlier than in the past was/is a good strategy, it does NOT follow that the programs consistently trying to out-early their competition were helping themselves in the long run. The very nature of ER means that it's taken a few years for that to become fully apparent, but I think by this point the results on the field clearly bear it out.

[51percentcorn]

As I have said before a certain poster on this thread reminds me of another certain someone who maintains that because it snows in DC once or twice a winter (or its cold somewhere) that global warming is a hoax.
How about these for stats (USILA):
- the last Hopkins 1st team AA goalie was Murtha in 2002
- the last Hopkins 1st team AA attackman was Barrie in 2003
- the last Hopkins 1st team AA defenseman was Durkin in 2013
- the last Hopkins 1st team AA LSM was Pellegrino in 2014
- the only exception to the RULE has been Tinney - before him you had to go all the way back to Kimmel and Ranagan in 10/11 for mid-fielders
- the tournament string coming to an end in 2013
- the first losing season in however many years in 2010- since 71?
- the 3 worst defeats in Hopkins playoff and maybe all time history - UVA '09, Duke '10, Duke '17
- in '16/'17/'19 - a combined record of 24-22
- allowing 37 goals in consecutive games to two schools within 5 miles of your campus

No filling up the roster with 8th graders and high school freshmen hasn't affected the program at all.

[WOMBAT, Mod Emeritus]

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[HopFan16]

ER was bad for Hopkins. But it was good for other programs. Most major programs at least dabbled in ER. Hopkins was far from the only blue chip program to build their classes chiefly from kids committing before junior year of high school. Maryland did it as much as anyone. They just did it better. And Tillman is obviously great at developing guys once they're on campus. The Terps got a commitment from an 8TH GRADER in 2017, shortly before the rule change. An 8th grader! His commitment made Forry Smith (who committed as a freshman in 2012) seem like a late bloomer by comparison.

UNC was doing it. Penn State. Duke. Michigan. Ohio State. You name it. Hop's mistake wasn't engaging in it at all, it was doing it poorly—or depending on your philosophy, it was failing to develop those kids once they got to college. Perhaps a mix of both.

Obviously, Epstein was a home run. You're not getting that kid unless you commit to him early on. It is probably true that the majority of Hop's better players in the last few years were relatively early commits. Epstein. Tinney. The Stanwicks. Williams. Marr. Smith. It's also true that many of those ER kids didn't pan out (we all know who they are, no need to name drop) and that Hop has had significant success here and there with the so-called late bloomers (Ryan Brown and Tucker Durkin come to mind, but also guys like Pat Foley and John Crawley were junior-year commits). If you don't do ER, you miss out on guys like Epstein, Tinney, etc. But if you devote your ENTIRE class to ER kids—and don't have the Tillmanesque magical sensei ability to get absolutely every ounce of talent out of every kid on the roster—then you're taking on a ton of risk without giving yourself any opportunity to find the diamonds in the rough, or the "glue guys" who might not have received big high school accolades but are necessary for any championship team. So, again, the mistake wasn't doing it at all—it was not doing it as well as some of the other teams that were doing it. My two cents. It doesn't really matter now. We'll find out in a couple years with the rule change if the Jays fare better with a system that no longer allows recruiting 8th graders. I certainly hope so!

[Sagittarius A*]

Homer’s point that ER created an arms race to the bottom is valid. The earlier you commit to a player the greater the risk he won’t pan out. While we have gotten some ER gems like Epstein and Forry Smith, overall ER seems to be temporally correlated with the decline of The JHU lax program. The other temporal correlation with decline is R.D. becoming president in 2009. Temporal correlations can have statistical significance but usually need to be combined with other data points to build a case.

[WOMBAT, Mod Emeritus]

Temporal decline, headed toward a cliff.

[OCanada]

There are lacrosse programs who accepted early recruits but did not announce them until later. There are lacrosse programs that have advised recruits to accept an offer from a next choice school and them flip if the are accepted there. There are players that told programs if you didn't accept them they would go elsewhere. Accounting for all this variables is next to impossible.

Not a little selection bias going on. Starsis BTW gave a huge impetus to ER lone before 2011.

It would probably be useful to deal with why kids decide to attend a particular school. How changes in the game have affected various programs , how personnel changes have affected various programs etc etc.

The coaches can coach and develop players. There is no one in lacrosse who questions it that i know. The question is what has set back getting the athletes needed to win titles. Have to account for injuries in there as well.

[WOMBAT, Mod Emeritus]

Temporal decline, headed toward a cliff.

Cliff

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[DocBarrister]

Homer’s point that ER created an arms race to the bottom is valid. The earlier you commit to a player the greater the risk he won’t pan out. While we have gotten some ER gems like Epstein and Forry Smith, overall ER seems to be temporally correlated with the decline of The JHU lax program. The other temporal correlation with decline is R.D. becoming president in 2009. Temporal correlations can have statistical significance but usually need to be combined with other data points to build a case.

Most high school lacrosse stars “don’t pan out” in terms of becoming college lacrosse stars. That’s just the nature of sports. That’s true of both the early and late bloomers. A former high school All-American playing on a team full of other high school All-Americans may not even get much playing time.

Coach Pietramala has been practicing early recruiting since he arrived on campus. All he has done is become one of the most successful lacrosse coaches in Hopkins history. Temporal correlations? Well, 2009 also happens to be the first year without Paul Rabil or Kyle Harrison, two of the best players of their generation ... and yes, both recruited by Dave Pietramala.

Neither early recruiting nor President Daniels are responsible for the decline seen at Hopkins. If you want to see the main reason, take a look at Petro’s defenses. Too complex, too passive, and often not nearly physical enough. Early recruiting has nothing to do with outdated defensive schemes.

Sorry, the performance of the numerous teams that have engaged in early recruiting and succeeded argues against blaming ER for a team’s “troubles”. For Hopkins, if Petro can get his defense to around 10 GAA, then you’re looking at a Final Four caliber team. The 2020 Blue Jays, largely assembled through early recruiting, are among the most talented teams in the country. ER can’t be blamed if this year’s squad doesn’t go far.

DocBarrister

[xxxxxxx]

Doc, I respect your knowledge and enjoy your posts, however I disagree with this:

Most high school lacrosse stars “don’t pan out” in terms of becoming college lacrosse stars.

Almost every college lacrosse star was a high school lacrosse star, just look at the AA list and I'll bet 90% were high school AA's as well. Some clearly don't pan out, but it is not "Most" in my opinion.

I also agree that the Hopkins Defense and many other are way too complicated, a coach I respect loves to say, "don't get beat and we don't have to slide".