Update on this kid. No baseball in his future, but he did get into college. Was heavily recruited by a number of high academic schools until the cheating came to light. Had interest from both Ivy league places and top academic D3's early on. Ended up not getting into any of them, in the end. Will be going to a large out of state state school. Don't know if he intends to try to play club ball there.
I do feel very bad for the kid. Apparently great student (assuming all those A's weren't entirely ill-gotten), Big and strong lefty pitcher with nasty stuff. Probably could have gone far.
I think it shows how much pressure kids are under today to be and do so much. Don't know what prompted him to cheat. But not a wise decision. Huge repercussions.
Could have gone the JC route too. Unless the family was not open to that from an academic standpoint, which is silly.
I met a kid several years ago at a JC game (very good wood bat JC league) who was supposed to get drafted as a pitcher and had a couple of standing big D1 offers. He got caught with some weed a couple of months before graduating. D1 offers gone, off of the radar for the draft. So he sought out this very good JC. Informed the coach what happened and went there to play and get the first two years of school out of the way.
No more trouble, good grades good performance the field he had no issue finding a good school after that.
Don't think a JC at all appealed to either the parents or the kid academically. The kid is one of those 4.0+ kids. Sure he would have felt under-challenged at a JC. From the beginning was always looking to play a very high academic school, whether it was Ivy League or highly selective D3. JC would have been a very big change in focus. They were thrilled when this all got started and the kid was getting very serious looks from the likes of Harvard, Yale,Amherst, etc.