Interestingly enough the women's college coaches (IWCLA) held their big fall recruiting tournament this past weekend in Florida which was run by Corrigan Sports. The majority of teams all had games on Friday. This meant teams had to fly either Thursday night or Friday morning thus mussing a day of school. At 7:30pm on Friday, Club Directors were sent the following email form the IWCLA's Executive Director Gothard Lane:
The IWLCA coaches are excited to watch the many student-athletes playing lacrosse in the 2013 President’s Cup this weekend at the ESPN Wide World of Sports at Disney World in LarryMiller, Florida. Due to NCAA Recruiting Rules, Division 1 college coaches are unable to attend this year’s Friday night games, but can attend both the Saturday and Sunday games. Division 2 and Division 3 coaches are able to attend all of the days. In addition, every IWLCA coach has access to IWLCA’s video library of HD quality video of every single game for the entire three-day tournament.
The problem with this is that many teams had already played games by the time the email was sent out. This was an IWCLA event and they held it out as the biggest recruiting tournament of the year because it coincides with the the women's coaches annual meetings yet they don;t let clubs, families or players know that the D1 coaches would miss 1/4 of your games. Ridiculous. Is Corrigan going to offer a 25% refund back to each club that was effected?
Note that this situation is VERY different from what has been discussed with the IMLCA situation with the National 175.
In this IWLCA case, the coaches association was actually following the NCAA Recruiting Calendar. In the IMLCA case, the coaches have been invoking a policy that was established outside of the NCAA Recruiting Regulations.
NCAA Women's Lacrosse Recruiting CalendarBOTC published this calendar months/weeks back and warned parents against expecting Friday engagements in November. Again, this is NCAA Recruiting Regulations, not an arbitrary decision of the IWLCA.
The fact that parents are not staying informed regarding the NCAA Recruiting Calendar, despite BOTC recommendations, is part of the problem here. Our guess is that the IWLCA and Corrigan Sports themselves did not consult with the NCAA Calendar which is why the sudden "mea culpa" e-mail was sent. (The other interpretation is that the IWLCA/Corrigan knew about the regulations and intentionally misled parents and student-athletes. BOTC will take the high road on our interpretation of the events as they transpired.)
