Field Hockey Commitment Timing

How the recruiting calendar plays out on social media.

If you're targeting D3, expect commitment announcements to ramp from April through July of senior year. D1 and D2 cluster around the November NLI signing day.

Source: Instagram posts from NCAA school field hockey accounts. Counts announcements seen on school accounts (NLI signing day + welcome posts) — verbal-commit timing that lives on athlete personal accounts isn't in this data.

Announcements by month

Coverage

Coverage by class year and division

A player counts as covered if at least one commit_announcement Instagram post on their school's account was matched to them by name. Coverage rises in more recent classes because more schools' accounts came into our scrape window.

Methodology

Each commit-announcement post is assigned to the matriculation year it announces using two rules in order:

  1. Explicit class year extracted from the caption (about 10% of posts).
  2. Signal + date heuristic. NLI-day posts (November) point at the following September. Welcome posts in June–August point at that summer's matriculation. Other commit posts follow a Sep–Dec → next-Sep / Jan–Aug → this-Sep rule.

Transfer-portal posts are excluded. The chart's right edge is capped at because the current calendar month is not yet fully scraped. Plan + reviewer notes: docs/plans/commits-research-v2.md.

Data generated .