The July 2026 update to our coaching databases is out to subscribers, and it’s one of the biggest single-month cycle we’ve tracked all year: over 10,000 change events across 1,962 schools and 39 sports. Softball is still the busiest sport in college athletics. Baseball’s summer shuffle keeps rolling. And with kickoff about a month away, football programs across every division level are locking down their fall staffs.
The Numbers
Across the full July update:
- 3,412 new coaches added
- 4,647 removals
- 1,075 job changes (promotions and internal moves)
- 514 email address updates
- 366 phone number updates
- Over 10,000 total change events — up sharply from June
The headline: 970 brand-new head coaches landed in this update — 705 external hires and 265 in-house promotions. That’s on top of what came through in June, and it hit basically every sport.
Softball Keeps Churning
For the second month in a row, softball had the highest change rate of any team sport at 11.9% — one out of every eight rows in the softball database moved this cycle. 15 new D1 head coaches landed in the file:
Larry Hays (Abilene Christian), Jenny Topping (Cal State Bakersfield — 2004 Olympic gold medalist), Hillary Smith (Dartmouth), Mike Shehorn (Delaware State), Matt Burns (Gardner-Webb), Harold Simmons (Idaho State), Jexx Varner (Kent State), Eric Oakley (Longwood), Sierra Hollins (Mississippi Valley State), Mallory Borden (Morehead State), Ricky Holden (NC Central), Sara Pelegreen (Robert Morris), Trent Partridge (Southeastern Louisiana), Chris Stelma (UMBC), and Chelsea Holliday (Maryland Eastern Shore).
Several of those are direct backfills from June’s cascade — Jenny Topping fills the Cal State Bakersfield vacancy we flagged last month, Matt Burns closes the Gardner-Webb search, and Harold Simmons steps into the Idaho State opening Andrew Rich left behind when he moved to Boise State. 50 softball programs saw 50%+ staff turnover in July alone, 11 of them in D1.
Two full months, back-to-back, of this kind of volume. If you’re a softball recruit, or working with a softball recruit, the address book you had at Memorial Day is largely obsolete.
Baseball’s Summer Shuffle Keeps Going
Baseball logged 41 total new head coaches this cycle — six at the D1 level: Andrew Gipson (LSU New Orleans), Jeff Mejia (Merrimack), Ryan Forrest (Princeton), Gregg Wallis (UC Riverside), Justin Thomas (Maryland Eastern Shore), and Toby DeMello (Pacific). Another 113 job changes shuffled existing baseball coaches into new roles at the same schools.
38 baseball programs hit 50%+ staff turnover in July — on top of the 55 we flagged in June. The Princeton and UC Riverside hires directly backfill vacancies from last month’s file.
Football Gears Up for Fall
The football story in July isn’t about head coaches — those hires happen in December and January. It’s about everyone else. Over 300 new football coaches and staffers landed in the database, plus 222 in-house promotions — the highest job-change volume of any sport this month. With Week 1 roughly four weeks out, programs are locking in position coaches, analysts, recruiting staff, and player personnel departments before games start.
The headline hire — and the most-famous name added to the database in July, across any sport — is Georgia Tech’s addition of five-time NFL All-Pro DeAndre Hopkins as assistant wide receivers coach. Hopkins joins head coach Brent Key’s staff after 13 NFL seasons and 85 career touchdown catches, reuniting with Georgia Tech offensive coordinator George Godsey, who was his position coach and offensive coordinator in Houston.
At the FBS level, Troy (7 promotions), Northwestern (5), and Auburn and Rice (4 each) led the way on in-house football moves.
Also This Month: Name Changes and a New Program
Four school-level changes are reflected in the July file — worth knowing if you keep saved contact lists or personalized filters that reference these programs by name:
- Florida Polytechnic University has been added to the database as a new NAIA program.
- Mississippi College is now Mississippi Christian University.
- University of New Orleans has rebranded as LSU New Orleans.
- Virginia Wesleyan University is now Batten University.
All four are already updated in the current file.
Why It Matters
Two months in a row of double-digit thousand-change updates. When you multiply softball’s 656 events, baseball’s 740, football’s 843, and men’s and women’s basketball’s roughly 660 each, you get a picture of college athletics that doesn’t slow down in the summer — it accelerates. Every one of those changes shifts an email address, closes an inbox, or opens a new one.
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ContactCollegeCoaches.com updates its college coaching contact databases every month. The July 2026 update is live now for existing subscribers.
