Your athlete has been working toward this for ten years. The commitment is signed. The school is chosen. Somewhere on a wall in your house, there’s a photo from signing day.
And now there’s a summer between where they were and where they’re going.
It’s not preseason yet. It’s not high school anymore. It’s 90 days of workouts and showcases and training sessions happening in front of coaches who haven’t decided what to think of them yet — coaches who will be watching, evaluating, forming first impressions they can’t take back.
The stakes didn’t drop when they committed. They shifted.
You’ve navigated a lot of pregame windows. The morning of a big game. Tournament weekends. The car ride after a bad loss. You know what to do with those. You’ve had years of practice.
This one is different. The room they’re walking into — the team, the culture, the coaching staff — is entirely new. The identity they built over the last decade doesn’t transfer automatically. They have to earn their place from scratch. And for the first time, the preparation they need is preparation you can’t do with them.
That’s the window we want to write about.
We’re building a series of Pregame issues around the specific moments parents of college-bound athletes face in the summer before freshman year — the moments that don’t have a name yet, but that every parent in this situation is already living.
The parents who read this newsletter notice things other parents walk past. That’s why I’m asking you, not running a survey.
With your commitments made and the fall is coming — what’s the summer feeling like? Not the workouts, not the logistics. The moment you noticed something had shifted. The car ride where something was different. The conversation that caught you off guard.
Leave your summer before experience in the comments. The more specific, the better. What you name here becomes the pregame issues we’ll write next.