Can someone help me understand - if coaches are not “allowed to initiate contact” until July 1 prior to junior year - how are kids in highschool class of 2024 and 2025 posting “thanks for the offer” about D1 and Ivy schools right now? Is it just that the offer isn’t official official until July 1?
Initiate is the key word. 
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Ok I thought so. (But it does seem like a public admission of completely skirting the rules)
Agree with the above. One way communication happens is that an intermediary (club/HS coach, recruiter, etc) talks with the college coach and then tells the athlete to call the coach on x day and x time, and the coach is waiting for that call.
Offers are never really ‘official’. Coaches can make verbal offers and students can accept them, but nothing is final until the student is admitted to the college (even if they signed an NLI).
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Agree with the above and would just add there are sports like football where offers aren’t even really offers, as in coaches ‘offer’ recruits but the offer isn’t really a commitable one. These end up on social media a lot.
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There is never a ‘firm commitment’ until the coach send an NLI and the player signs the NLI. Until that point, all commitments are rescindable by either party. If a school doesn’t use NLI (Ivies, service academies, D3 schools) there really is never a lock in and the student can always go somewhere else and play immediately.
That’s really the only penalty too, that if a player signs an NLI and changes his mind, he can still go to another school but may not be able to accept an athletic scholarship for one year and may not be able to play immediately, but even that is not a certainty because of the new ‘portal’ rules.
Many students initiate contact, and the coach can talk to them. They know them through a coach, a brother/sister, a cousin. The student can cold call (or even send an email saying "I’m calling at 4 pm).
Most of the rules about not committing or no contact before X date are set by the conference (Ivy, NESCAC, SEC) or by the coaches in that sport. The NCAA doesn’t care.
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My son initiated contact early, which is how that happened for us. One program initiated contact with him, but didn’t contact him directly, they reached out to his HS coach and used him as an intermediary to contact my son.
Are Ivy League schools really taking athletes with 3.5 gpa’s from states with terrible school systems? Also - is there a difference for boys and girls? Feel like girls are held to a higher gpa standard.
I am certain the average scores and grades for all of the men’s and women’s teams combined will be the same. The scores and grades for some teams will be higher than others, however. There is probably less variation between the various womens teams compared to the mens teams.
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I am not sure the genesis of your question on the GPA. There are absolutely athletes in the Ivy leagues with unweighted core GPAs of 3.5, and even lower. Don’t know how the HS rep might play into that.
In college admissions in general there is more give on GPA for male applicants. Jeff Selingo addressed this in his most recent book, and on his AMA here. I assume women athletic recruits would also have higher GPA ranges on average, but don’t know that for a fact.
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I don’t know which states you think have “terrible school systems” but the Ivies generally aren’t going to green light recruits who can’t do the work. 3.5 isn’t a disqualifier but I wouldn’t say it’s common, and that probably isn’t a mediocre athlete.
Athletic recruiting has different challenges for boys and girls but I don’t think either path is easy and I don’t know any parents of legit athletic recruits who play the grass is greener game (except maybe to envy the kids who are not athletes, are okay but not great students, and will be happy at any college).