A mother and her daughter joined me on a video call a few weeks ago. They’re the kind of people who show up on time with the camera already on. The daughter is in high school. She had a notebook logged with university coach conversations and questions ready, evidence that she’d done her homework. She was open to Canadian schools, along with Division I and Division II south of the border. She had the results and the grades to support her athletic and academic aspirations.
But, she was confused about what the NCAA means for her: whether she fits what college programs are looking for and if so, how and where to explore those opportunities. Her perplexity didn’t stem from a lack of effort.
During the call, her mom mentioned that a Division II program had already told them recruiting was finished for the 2027 class. It was May 2026. A school had closed the door more than six months before the signing period was even set to open.
They hadn’t done anything wrong, and no deadline had silently passed them by. Rather, they were reacting to a shifting landscape; the ground underneath college athletics has been moving for five straight years. It was a crystal clear exemplification of what’s been going on in track and field and cross country recruiting for a half-decade now. The result: we are asking sixteen-year-olds and their parents to keep up with a complex and dynamic system.
Somewhere along the way, the burden of understanding was handed to the families of high school athletes, who never asked for it and didn’t see it coming.
And for the record, all signs point to the young woman I referenced becoming a high school provincial champion in her event by this time next year.
High schoolers and their families are not the problem
I talk to parents who are organized, curious, polite, and want nothing more than the best opportunities for their kids. I meet with athletes who earn high grades and put up performances on the track or in the field that would make them difference-makers on college rosters, not just warm bodies to meet athletic department roster size goals.
Despite the data websites, AI tools, and everything else these families have at their fingertips, the terrain has been altered so fast and so frequently that even sharp, motivated student-athletes and their parents cannot reasonably work out how recruiting is “supposed” to go.
A few days ago, I spoke with a student-athlete from Alberta, who also has times fast enough to win a provincial title in his event before he graduates. He is weighing Division I against U SPORTS, but online resources, like results and standards databases, are failing him because even they can’t keep up with the changes. This particular athlete needed to understand that staying in Canada might be his strongest move if he chooses to rule out Division II altogether.
That same week, the mother and daughter got their 2027 verdict from the Division II school.
In both cases, I walked them through why they’re running into such a swampy recruitment space right now: the House settlement and the proposed five-in-five rule have squeezed rosters. Recruiting behaviour is not the same as it was a year ago, and last year wasn’t the same as it was in 2024. Rules and regulations get introduced, universities and their personnel react, and families are left unable to judge where they fit based on data or trends. They’re waist-deep in the swamp and the only voice they can hear is Shrek yelling at them to get out.
For families, keeping up is close to impossible without one of two things: a personal relationship with a college coach who genuinely understands everything in motion, and plenty of them don’t, or year-round access to someone tracking it across the NCAA, U SPORTS, the NAIA, the CCAA, and American junior college systems at once.
I won’t pretend a family is doomed without that. But the blunt truth is that a mark an NCAA coach treated as a walk-on or scholarship standard last week may not hold today.
Numbers need context
The data is blind. Results databases, standards pages, and even a college team’s own recruiting page all give you a slice of what was true the last time someone updated them, which usually wasn’t recently.
I’m not suggesting that data is useless. In our sport, we’re fortunate to eat, sleep, and breathe performance metrics because it removes the recruiting barriers associated with team sports, like scouts, film, camps, and tournaments. What I am suggesting is that the data families reference needs context more now than ever.
The families of high school recruits need to remember that most of what they find online is unmaintained and void of the nuance the moment demands.
If you’re wondering what I mean by “context” and ”nuance,” here it is simply: determining whether an opportunity exists comes from knowing what a program is building, how it is funded, and where its coaches are steering it.
That information is vital. It tells the part of the story that results and standards data can’t provide on their own.
Five years of moving parts
Families are up against a compound of policy changes that have hit faster than anyone outside the system could fairly be expected to absorb.
Since 2021, NIL (name, image, and likeness) arrived, standardized testing requirements became muddy, the transfer portal grew from a backcountry road to a six-lane highway, and the 2025 House settlement reshaped how Division I rosters are built and funded. Now, the proposed five-in-five eligibility model is heading toward a vote. Underneath all of it, conferences keep reshuffling, and a program that switches leagues can wake up recruiting to different standards than it did the year before.
Each change rewired an aspect of collegiate track and field roster-building. [For details on each change in sequence, I’ve broken them down here: How NCAA Track & Field Recruiting Changed: 2021 to Today.]
What I’ll focus on here is the cumulative effect. Together, they are the reason a well-prepared family can do everything right and still get blindsided by a door that shuts thirteen months before graduation, for a class that can’t even apply for post-secondary until the next academic year or officially join a collegiate team until the following November.
If five-in-five passes, the same rule squeezing the 2027 class could swing value back toward true incoming high school freshmen as the eligibility clock resets around them. A crunch in one direction has a way of becoming a reset in another, and you only catch that if you are watching the whole board.
Canadians are playing a different game
The hardest part of my role as an advisor in this space is delivering reality checks to aspiring student-athletes and their families. I never aim to discourage and always strive to help young athletes set themselves up for success.
With that in mind…
To US colleges, Canadian athletes are international students. Reasonably, families are rarely interested in walk-on opportunities due to the financial obligation. For scholarship spots, Canadians usually cost the school more than an in-state kid. As a result, the bar for a Canadian tends to be higher than the bar set for an athlete from the school’s own backyard.
Canadian high schoolers who consider studying stateside are often the farthest thrower in their province, the fastest in their zone, or the best hurdler in their track club’s history. But when those kids put their hat in the NCAA recruiting ring, they go from big fish in a small pond to minnows in the sea. This doesn’t immediately mean they’re set to be overlooked by college coaches, but that the talent pool they are measured against is massive. More than 17,000 American high schools registered upwards of 1.1 million outdoor track and field athletes in 2024-25 (644,235 boys and 513,808 girls). In the United States, outdoor track and field draws more participation than any other sport.
The takeaway: Canadian families shouldn’t aim lower, but they do need to aim with their eyes open.
Canadian athletes are extraordinarily well-equipped to thrive at every level of collegiate track and field and cross country. In terms of athletic ability and academic readiness, they offer everything (and often more than) their American counterparts do. They tend to be phenomenal teammates, sharp communicators, and genuinely coachable.
U SPORTS programs are home to future Olympians and deserve serious consideration. South of the border, NCAA programs across all three divisions and NAIA schools can be tremendous destinations, too. Getting to one, Division I especially, takes work, and a good chunk of that work may need to live with the parents and guardians, so that the athletes themselves can keep chasing As in the classroom and personal bests on the track and in the field.
Carmyn James has experienced recruiting from both sides. A former NCAA Division I head coach, she is now Athletics Canada’s first NCAA Athlete Performance Advisor, working with Canadian athletes competing in the NCAA. She is quick to say the NCAA can be a tremendous path for a Canadian athlete. Her point is that it should be chosen with eyes open, not by default. She starts with the money. “The exchange rate needs to be taken into consideration,” she told me. “If you’re not fully covered, the remaining cost can be really expensive.” A partial scholarship that looks generous in US dollars can still leave a Canadian family with a larger bill than expected.
She also wants families to give the schools at home equal weight. “There are outstanding programs here in Canada with five years of eligibility,” she said. “Canadian schools are very good when it comes to development.” Her eligibility point hits harder than it first reads. While the NCAA debates whether to hand athletes five years of competition inside a five-year window, U SPORTS already offers five years outright.
What college coaches see from the inside
Those at the helm of college programs have the opportunity to react to the NCAA’s dynamic guardrails first. One NCAA Division I distance coach put the shift in plain terms when we spoke recently.
“People are running faster, so a 10:25 might be what a 10:35 was five years ago. The top schools with roster spots left can get 10:10 and 10:15 girls instead of 10:25 girls. The spots that used to exist for those 10:25 athletes just don’t anymore.”
He has watched recruits learn that lesson the hard way.
“I’ve had girls I recruited who I told, hey, we can’t wait for you to make decisions. And they said no, I’m going to wait. A couple of them are going to find that the opportunities they thought they had just don’t exist anymore.”
He sees the same squeeze coming for the next class. With five-in-five on the table, programs have every reason to hold onto an athlete they already know.
“If I can keep a girl I’ve developed over four years for a fifth year, why wouldn’t I? If they’re developed and they want to stay, I’ll keep them every time over a freshman I don’t know.”
By no means are coaches like this one opposed to recruiting true freshmen, but factors outside their control have created conditions that require those recruits to be higher performers, prepared to make decisions sooner.
Carmyn James sees the same picture from the Canadian side, and her takeaway for families is direct: if you have a shot at Division I, weigh development as part of the decision, not just performance. “A lot of the thinking is scholarship-driven, when there needs to be equal consideration for academics and development,” she said. She is candid about what that can look like at the top of the division. “The top-end D1 programs may not be as focused on long-term athlete development. They want athletes who can score in their conference right away.”
Build your own puzzle
The opportunities haven’t evaporated. Sure, there are fewer total D1 roster spots, but at the same time, I speak with collegiate coaches across associations and divisions every week who are eager to offer scholarships and roster spots.
If five-in-five passes, there may even be a market adjustment, with true high school freshmen more sought-after than they have been in years. And a few things about this sport refuse to change:
- The majority of coaches got into coaching because they’re passionate about developing athletes. They want to hit their AD’s goals, win banners, and earn promotions, but at their core, most college coaches are there to help recruits become student-athletes who get better and better and better every year.
- Track and field and cross country are data-driven sports by nature. Nobody is breaking down game film. Politics stays minor. Fast times, far throws, and big leaps get rewarded.
- Academic excellence will always be rewarded. Separate from roster sizes, coach decisions, and athletic eligibility, and distinct from the athletic department entirely, is the university itself. Student-athletes will always open more doors for themselves if they have high grades. A lot of the time, those doors are worth big academic scholarship dollars, too.
If any parents have reached this point of the article and are wondering what the heck to do, here’s food for thought:
- Start building your knowledge of the college/university system(s). Give yourself the honest ability to set goals with the athlete in your family based on the reality coaches are living right now, not the one AnonymousRunner619 described on Reddit eighteen months ago.
- Stop thinking only in divisions and associations. Focus on fit: the right coach, the right weather, the right field of study, the right out-of-pocket cost. Every one of those is different for every family. Build your own puzzle with your own pieces.
Near the end of our call, I walked the mother and daughter through how I think about this. We didn’t open a list of hundreds of schools and start crossing names off. We narrowed to a short list that fit her: a coach she clicked with, a training group she wanted to be part of, the right program for what she wanted to study, a cost her family could carry, and a place she could see herself living for the next five years. On top of those, there was space for a couple of new options with potential to be a fit. For them, the work was about understanding the environment and how she could fit into it, along with what’s most important for her individually as she grows as a human, student, and athlete.
Here’s what I tell many of the recruits I speak with:
There will be a day in your second winter when the holidays are over, the campus is frozen, the course you need for your degree is beating you up, and your hamstring is sore, so training is miserable. That day arrives for every student-athlete, at every school, in every division. The athletes who get through it are the ones who did the homework first. They compared their options, they know why they chose what they chose, and they can sit on that bad day and say it’s because school is hard and track is hard, not because they picked the wrong place. The ones who end up blaming the school, blaming their coach, or transferring are usually those who never asked (and never answered) the right questions before they committed.
The goalposts moved. The kids did not move them. The system handed its complexity to teenagers and left them to sort it out alone. The least the rest of us can do, myself included, is stop pretending the old map still works and hand these families a new one.
Brett Montrose is the Founder and Co-CEO of Streamline Athletes, a recruiting platform built exclusively for track and field and cross country athletes and an official partner of Athletics Canada.
