We have a lot of kids from my son's class who went JUCO. The schools here now have related apartments, so everyone, whether an athlete or not, picked a roommate and had that "college" experience.
On the flip side — the thing that scared me about the JUCO was one coach was showing us around his school and bragging that he wasn't required to recruit to fill a dorm, so beware of that. We also saw some very high quality baseball, so JUCO may have a lot of numbers of whom few are the stars destined for time and attention and D1 offers later.
Finally, my son is in his first year AT a college, but he's listed as a sophomore due to the high number of AP and dual credit classes he took while in HS. We eventually decided that academically, the JUCO was barely good for a year for him.