Lots of great comments here as usual. I should have added this at the beginning of this thread. My son’s travel coach is a guy who was drafted in the first round of the MLB draft out of high school as a catcher many years ago. He peaked at Triple A in his career. He doesn’t like or believe in the entire system of recruiting. Naturally, his views may be influenced by how easy it came for him because he’s obviously extremely talented. However, he keeps telling my son one consistent thing that I haven’t confirmed but is probably true. He said if you want to play at a high D1 level in college you should go JuCo because the best programs bring catchers in from JuCo to start as juniors and seniors. He said they do this because they need catchers with game experience and catchers can get that in JuCo. Our son has wanted to play baseball at a HA school, so this was never an option for him. However, occasionally he’d come home after practice and try to sell us on the idea that JuCo was better for him based on his coach’s comments. On a separate note, I would agree that logically it would seem that most good programs aren’t going to rely on a walk-on. We just saw it happen in two cases. Clearly, one was a very exceptional kid based on earlier info in this thread. In fact, in that particular case, the Princeton coach said that this kid even taught him a few things about framing!