I don’t think anyone wants to decide as a freshman or early sophomore, but I suspect bad things will happen if neither the college coach nor the kid can obtain any firsthand knowledge about each other until start of junior year. First, I don't like the extremely compressed timeframe to meet coaches, go on visits, and commit under pressure before roster spots fill up that the NCAA seems to be pushing. Before the rule changes, families at least had time to visit as many mutually-interested coaches and their programs as they wanted for at least a year without running a risk that roster spots would be gone in a span of days or weeks. That's a much more leisurely pace compared to the NCAA's current direction. It also means club coaches will turn even more into de facto agents, and families will need to rely even more on them to identify who is a good fit, whose personalities mesh, and also broker visits the first couple weeks of junior year in anticipation of the inevitable free-for-all starting the first day of recruiting, when kids should instead be focusing on school and the SAT and college coaches on soccer season. There’s already a lot of reliance on club coaches, but at least we were able to meet coaches and form our own opinions. And the new rules haven't seemed to deter kids from committing early, only they're presumably committing now without having ever met the coach or visited the program. How is that a good thing?
I get that freshman year is early to decide where to go to college but, in reality, does it really matter most of the time? The schools that fill all their roster spots with freshman and sophomores are not exactly the types of institutions that are ever a bad idea. Sure, the coach might leave, but that’s surprisingly unusual in girls soccer and, well, s**t happens. Personally, I'd rather run that risk than the risk under the new rules that she can't commit until junior year but blows out her knee as a sophomore and misses out on guaranteed admission to a elite academic school and the money they offered her as a freshman.
There's no perfect solution for everyone, but I think limiting a family’s access to information that is critical to making an important life decision for their kid is a really bad idea, and even worse when you replace it with the judgment of a youth soccer coach. It’s better to face the reality that everyone has a pretty good idea during freshman year of HS what kind of player a girl will be in college, and to have rules that work based on reality. In the elite girls soccer player demographic, kids rarely jump the rails and fail to qualify academically, commit a felony, give up soccer, get fat unexpectedly or develop substance abuse problems. Maybe they don't turn out as great as expected, but rarely do HS freshman commits end up being so bad in college that they aren't helpful. But even if half seriously underperform, a college still has 15 kids on the roster playing as expected or better, and that’s plenty. Which means colleges will always at least scout 8-10th graders whether we think it’s too early or not, and they’ll be ready to drop all their offers the first day of junior year or use, which will inevitably turn into the kind of free-for-all that isn’t good for anyone.
