Let's Talk About Watchlists

Tomorrow starts our Rookie Watchlists being released, with Returning Player Watchlists being the following week.

We have been posting D1, D2, D3, and High School Watchlists for the past 3 seasons, and every year, it becomes our most controversial post. We’re talking hundreds of complaints via DMs, emails, and texts.

As we enter watchlist week(s), we wanted to break down the reasoning and process of building a watchlist to hopefully pre-answer questions.

This answer is different depending on who is making the watchlist, but for The Field Hockey Analyst, the watchlist is 2 things:

1. Who we think is most likely to be receiving our in-season and post-season awards (i.e., Best XI of the Month, Top 10%, Rookie Class)
2. Players whom we love to watch and think are exciting.

We build our watchlists independently, with the exception of the programs that are competing in their first season this year. These lists are based on stats and watching a lot of hockey.

In previous years, the watchlists have heavily favored returning athletes (which you will understand more later in this article), so for this season, we have separated the rookies to their own watchlists.

We also post Rookie Classes at the end of the year, separate from the Top 10% Lists, so it makes sense to separate the rookies for this, since it is a prediction of who will make the postseason list.

While we do not make a Rookie Class post for High School, we do a separate 50-player watchlist for the High Schoolers. High school awards heavily favor upperclassmen, which is why we keep the list to such a limited number of athletes.

The College Returning Players Watchlist is essentially a top returning players list. We look at our 2025 Player Efficiency Rating and add the top 3 returning players who were in the Top 500 players (teams with no players in the Top 500 will have their top returning player added).

We have a list of notable transfers and goalkeepers that get added to the list, but ultimately, returning field players tend to make up the majority of the list. With this method, first-year players were given the least priority, which is why we are doing a separate list in 2025.

We keep these lists capped at 3 returning athletes per team to allow room for all teams to have at least one player on the lists. We prefer to recognize all schools rather than have many players from a select number of schools.

While tracking commitment data, we also note important accomplishments for every player, such as NEXUS, JOs, All-American, and All-Region. For the D1 programs, we add the players who have the most points in our ranking system.

For programs that do not have players with the above accomplishments, we view their recruiting profiles, check for awards such as All-State, All-Conference, etc., and make the decision based on these.

This year we are incorporating more international players into the Rookie Watchlist than in 2025, due to the data found in our post-season evaluation. In 2025, 81.4% of the TFHA Rookie Class were internationals.

As mentioned above, we track data for every commit, so for 2027s and committed 2028s, the same data is used. We also track the same data for uncommitted athletes and 2029s, although they tend to have less data since All-Region and All-American typically go to upperclassmen.

Since TFHA does not compile post-season awards at the high school level, the watchlists are more for players who we predict will win All-State, All-Region, or All-American. Because of this, we also look at All-State awards and stats leaders from sources such as MaxPreps.

We also watch a lot of club hockey, so at events like NEXUS, NITs, RCCs, and any streamed club events, we are making notes of players to add to our radar.

The High School Rookie Watchlist is limited to only 50 players, because it is very hard to find information for the younger players and post-season awards are typically not given to first-years.

We have watched a majority of these players in person at various events. Most, if not all, the players on this year’s watchlist attended NEXUS this year or last year.

Having an up-to-date recruiting profile is extremely important when it comes to making the high school lists.

We have not done nominations since the 2024 season.

The NFHCA accepts nominations (and is currently taking nominations) for their watchlists, and we recommend that coaches nominate their players for the NFHCA Watchlists.

We know that some 7th and 8th graders play up to high school teams or play on competitive middle school programs, and in the past, we did post stats for 8th graders. However, we have since moved away from doing so because we believe that focusing on awards and stats at a young age can negatively impact a player’s natural love for the game.

As mentioned before, for college, the list is limited to 3 players per team, meaning that some top players are left out due to this restriction. The purpose of the limit is to limit the lists to under 500 players.

For high school, there are over 60,000 players who play high school field hockey. We are naming approximately 400 players to the list in 2026, meaning the list only reflects approximately 0.7% of players. Most high school players will not make the list.

We do not provide specific feedback for why a player does not make the watchlist.

We hope this answered your questions about our watchlists and that you are excited to watch some great hockey players this fall! Comment with any other questions you have!