Grit: The JUCO baseball story

Colin Spear had everything he could have asked for.

During the 2020 travel ball season after his sophomore year of high school, the 6-foot-2 infielder earned himself a Division I offer at a tournament in Florida. It only took Spear a week to commit to the University of Nevada-Reno, joining the Wolfpack for the 2023 season.

“I took the offer, like, the next week because it was the randomness of [Covid-19],” Spear said in an interview while he was driving his car, wearing a camo hat with the hood of his sweatshirt up. “Everyone was getting their years [of eligibility] back, so I just didn’t want to get my offer pulled. I could’ve waited but I didn’t.”

The San Francisco native was slated to join a team which won the Mountain West conference and made an NCAA Regional for the first time since 2000 the season right after he committed.

But the coaching staff who recruited Spear left the Wolfpack one month before his freshman year, leaving the right-handed hitter in the hands of a different head coach. The right-hander redshirted his first year, meaning he did not play in any games his freshman year and maintained all four years of his NCAA eligibility.

Spear spent two seasons at Nevada, only recording two pinch-hit appearances which both ended in strikeouts.

“I saw the two at-bats. I think it was a month until the end of the season, I was like, ‘I’m out of here. I’m leaving,’” Spear said.

After his redshirt freshman year, Spear entered the transfer portal and, despite talking to another Division I school which would force him to walk on to the team instead of giving him a full scholarship, he decided to take a chance, bet on himself and enroll at West Valley College, a junior college in Saratoga, California, and play with the Vikings.

Junior college baseball, colloquially referred to as JUCO baseball, is not the traditional route for ball players who make the major leagues, but it is still a good option for players to continue and even advance their careers.

Spear capitalized on the bounceback opportunity with the Vikings, leading the team with his 12 home runs and 59 runs batted in, better known as RBI, through the team’s first 42 games of the season on top of his strong .335 batting average.

His strong play with the Vikings, backed by his previous play in high school, earned him another Division I offer with the University of Pacific Tigers, an offer he accepted April 1. Spear’s new team even played Nevada just last season, opening the door for the infielder to get revenge on his former team in a future non-conference matchup.

While Spear used JUCO as a bounceback opportunity, players across the country enter the JUCO ranks for many different reasons, ranging from academics to baseball inexperience.

Here are stories of current and former JUCO players about their experience and the baseball lives they lived afterwards.

A photo from the Chaffey College dugout before a game. (Photo by Thomas Johnson)

Chapter 1: College Recruitment

Social media has made college recruiting seem like an idyllic scenario. Colleges and universities will court an athlete for years, the player will make their choice and then hire someone to make a nice graphic to announce their commitment.

While certain athletes earn that type of treatment and status, it often only goes to the top 1% of high school ball players.

The odds of making it to an NCAA out of high school are incredibly low, as the below chart shows. While there were 11,712 baseball players at the NCAA Division I level in 2023, that amounts to 2.4% of the high school player population.

High School Participants	NCAA Participants	Overall % HS to NCAA	% HS to NCAA Division I	% HS to NCAA Division II	% HS to NCAA Division III
478,451	38,849	8.1%	2.4%	2.4%	3.2%

Source: NCAA

It is incredibly difficult to play at what is generally considered the highest level of the sport; 428 of the 614 MLB draft picks in 2023 came directly from NCAA Division I schools.

NCAA Participants	Approximate # Draft Eligible	# Draft Picks	# NCAA Drafted	% NCAA to Major Pro
38,849	8,633	614	444	5.1%

Source: NCAA

However, junior colleges provide a new chance for those who do not earn NCAA offers to continue to play ball. JUCO’s are two-year colleges which are not governed by NCAA rules, but do provide a pathway for athletes to move on to the NCAA level once their two years of JUCO eligibility are up.

Right-handed pitcher Colby Scheuber graduated from Ocosta High School, situated on the coast of Washington near his hometown of Aberdeen. Scheuber started the recruiting process late — in the summer heading into his senior year of high school — because he had never thought about playing college baseball until after the pandemic.

While Scheuber was in discussion with some NCAA schools out of high school, he never earned an offer.

“I would have been a project arm. I probably would have redshirted if I'd gone to a four-year and that was a big thing. I wanted to play immediately,” Scheuber said. “So I also knew that a junior college would be one of the options that I could probably go and play immediately at.”

Scheuber landed at Grays Harbor College, a school in the Northwest Athletic Conference, better known as the NWAC, which constitutes one of multiple JUCO versions of the NCAA.

The former Grays Harbor Choker achieved his goal, appearing in seven games as a true freshman and adding 12 games as a sophomore.

“Right before my sophomore spring, I had been reached out to by a couple coaches,” Scheuber said. “I pitched a little bit [my freshman year], but not enough to gain any recruiting traction, so they really wanted to see me pitch in the spring. So it was early January, and then it really picked up, I want to say, in late February and March.”

Scheuber had five schools interested in him, but he landed at Salem University, a NCAA Division II school in West Virginia. Scheuber has since transferred away from Salem to another Division II school, Cal State San Bernardino, but his eight appearances this season through May 6 show JUCO players don’t just sit on the bench at NCAA schools, but contribute.

The Chaffey College Panthers play at Howard Lowder Field. (Photo by Thomas Johnson)

Chapter 2: JUCO Conditions

While these athletes are at junior colleges, they not only develop as players, but as people too.

Certain Division I schools have top-tier staffs, specifically teams in a Power Five conference, with people dedicated to very specific support efforts for the student-athletes. The most recent winner of the College World Series, the Tenneesee Volunteers, serve as a prime example.

This season, the Volunteers have three other coaches to support head coach Tony Vitello, along with a 10-person support staff which ranges from a director of baseball sports performance to an assistant director of baseball operations.

JUCOs generally do not have a third of that staff. Chaffey College sits in Rancho Cucamonga, California and competes in the California Community College Athletic Association, a governing organization which is better known as the 3C2A and works similar to the NWAC.

Donald Brais (Photo courtesy of Chaffey College)

Donald Brais is an assistant coach at Chaffey, one of three full-time coaches for the Panthers.

Without a large support staff, players have to grind their way through their seasons, doing a lot of things for themselves.

Right-handed pitcher John Vaara is currently at the JUCO level, competing for Edmonds College in the NWAC. Vaara, now in his redshirt sophomore year, has had plenty of experience doing the nitty gritty work Division I athletes do not have to do as often.

While NCAA schools pride themselves on the term “student-athlete,” JUCO athletes have to do a lot more than just school and baseball. Where NCAA athletes can show up to a maintained field, JUCO coaches and athletes likely have to do the field maintenance themselves.

“We take care of our own field. There's been times that we had to go tear the mound apart, tear the turf off, resurface, re-clay everything,” Vaara said. “We're taking care of anything the athletic department has. We work all the softball games, soccer, volleyball, basketball. The baseball guys are there working. We help out a lot for the athletic program. There's no one else doing it for us.”

When Scheuber was at Grays Harbor College as a freshman, the Chokers did not have a home field to practice on consistently and had to practice on a poorly maintained high school field.

“It doesn't matter if you don't have this, you still have to go get your work in,” Scheuber said. “We made do with what we had, for sure, but it definitely isn't like what I have experienced the last two years when it comes to facilities.”

Additionally, Division I athletes have a much better chance to profit off their name, image and likeness, but companies would be reluctant to sign JUCO athletes while they’re still at the junior college level because of their lack of a platform.

Without the lack of financial support, JUCO athletes have to find ways to make ends meet.

“There's times where it is a struggle. We have guys that are working a job or two to try to make ends meet, try to pay rent, food, all that on top of [being a] full-time student [and] practice every day,” Vaara said. “The people you meet [are] going to teach you a lot more than any of the classes you're taking at a JUCO.”

While NCAA bylaws limit practice time for student-athletes to “a maximum of four hours per day and 20 hours per week,” JUCO schools have no such limits, with players practicing for as long as their coaches want them to.

Julio Vasquez Jr. is a catcher at Henderson State, an NCAA Division II school in Arkansas, after spending two years at Howard College in Texas. Howard College is different from an NWAC or 3C2A school in that it is governed by the NJCAA, another NCAA equivalent but on a much larger scale.

However, the lack of practice limits reign over all JUCOs, no matter the organization.

“You never knew when practice was really going to end, because [the] drill could take a lot longer for not doing it right, for example,” Vasquez Jr. said. “There's things like that, being able to just overcome some mental barriers. You're just at war, basically, trying to get it right, do it ‘til you can't get it wrong.”

The conditions at JUCOs are not the most ideal with long practices at less-funded facilities. Yet, these players still have the opportunities to move on to four-year universities and be some of the best players at Division I schools.

Players who fight through those conditions learn new values they might not have if they started out at a four-year university with a full ride to a Division I school.

Ryan Wike played at Edmonds College with Vaara before moving on to Jamestown University, a four-year school in North Dakota, and the right-handed pitcher agrees with that sentiment.

“I don't want to talk bad about anybody, but guys that are career four-year school athletes are so soft,” Wike said. “They get mad, like it is really cold out here [in North Dakota]. They're like, ‘man, it's freezing in the bubble today.’ And I'm like, ‘Dude, we had to play a game in the snow, but you couldn't see the foul lines.’ We had pitchers running around the field in between pitches and innings, shoveling the snow off foul lines so we could play. It's cold. Put a hoodie on.”

The common word all of these players used was “grit.” They learned to be tough so when small inconveniences happened at their next schools, it did not affect them as much.

Vaara is still looking for a new home, but the rest of these players used their JUCO experiences to earn spots on four-year university rosters.

A view from home plate at Chaffey College. (Photo by Thomas Johnson)

Chapter 3: Life after JUCO

JUCO players don’t want their careers to end at the junior college level. The whole point is so they can find a new home at their next opportunity.

Jackson Price started his career at Pacific University, a NCAA Division III school. He then took a gap year to train before heading to the JUCO level at Chaffey heading into this season. Still, with only one year of JUCO eligibility remaining, Price realizes what’s on the horizon.

“Everybody's trying to get their offer, everybody's trying to get on, get to the next school,” Price said. “A really big [value] that our coach stresses a lot that I agree with is, from his perspective, he always says, ‘We have to get ours before you can get yours.’ … If you can help the team win and you can help the team grow, then you will get your opportunity.”

The best teams produce the best players and have the most eyes on them. While JUCO baseball players could take on a selfish mindset, the best way for them to get their opportunities is to make sure the team is successful.

Chaffey College has had a strong pedigree of sending players to NCAA schools with that team outlook. Just in the past two seasons, the Panthers have sent players to multiple Division I schools — UNLV and Gonzaga University among them — along with Division II schools — Cal Poly Pomona and Point Loma Nazarene University are two strong examples.

Still, given the high number of draft picks out of NCAA schools compared to JUCOs, most outside the baseball community assume players at the JUCO level are not good enough to play for an NCAA school, which is why they’re playing junior college baseball.

“I mean, it’s a fair statement,” Brais said. “I bet every single dude on USC’s roster could start at Chaffey College. I bet they could. Anybody who plays at a NCAA level is good enough to play at the NCAA level. That's why they're there. And not every JUCO player is good enough to play at the NCAA level.”

But JUCO players have consistently proven their worth when they reach the NCAA level, disproving that belief that every single NCAA player is better than every single JUCO player.

“Our best guys go in and start at their Division I [schools] right away,” Brais said. “The statement is true, the NCAA is better. If we go play USC, they're going to beat us, but it's probably going to be a lot closer game than people actually think.”

Brais’ statement holds bearing. Even beyond NCAA production, JUCO athletes have had a strong showing in Major League Baseball. During the 2023 draft, which featured 614 total picks, MLB teams selected 104 players who had spent time at an NJCAA school, with 25 coming directly from an NJCAA school.

These 10 JUCOs each had at least one MLB draftee during the 2024 MLB Draft.

The triple-digit number does not even include alumni of 3C2A, NWAC or other similar JUCO leagues, so there actually are many more JUCO players in Major League Baseball organizations.

The Chaffey Panthers are pictured warming up before a game against Mt. San Jacinto (Photo by Thomas Johnson)

Chapter 4: The Future of JUCOs

The JUCO route might even become more popular in the coming years.

On Dec. 23, the NCAA Division I Board of Directors approved a waiver which will allow players who competed at non-NCAA schools for one or more years, including junior colleges, to play during the next academic year if they would have otherwise run out of eligibility during the 2024-25 year.

If the NCAA approved the waiver for next year, it’s fair to assume the organization could do it for future seasons as well.

“Anything the NCAA has done over the last like five years has really only helped junior college baseball get better,” Brais said. “I don't like this ruling, personally, because it's like, at a certain point, you're gonna have like a 26-, 27-year-old college baseball player.”

While players like Vaara have similar sentiments about the decision, Price was very happy when he heard about the waiver, showing the divisiveness of the issue.

“Being able to go to JUCO without starting a clock or without losing the opportunity to then go and make money and play four more years and enjoy your time at a NCAA school, I think it's going to be really beneficial to a lot of guys,” Price said. “I’m excited to see where it goes.”

Wherever it goes, JUCO players will always have their place in the baseball world. No JUCO story is the same, with most of these players describing their journeys as “unique,” but the athletes all seem to have the same throughline of becoming “gritty” at their JUCOs.

Whether it’s Spear or Price using junior college as a bounceback opportunity, or the experience of Vasquez Jr., Vaara, Wike and Scheuber who started out at a JUCO, junior college baseball allows players to continue their careers.

And once their teams get theirs, the players can go on and get their own.

Grit: The JUCO baseball story

The stories of six players and one coach in the JUCO world.

By Thomas Johnson

Chapter 1: College Recruitment

Chapter 2: JUCO Conditions

Chapter 3: Life after JUCO

Chapter 4: The Future of JUCOs