College sports are an ever-changing landscape with new rules and regulations constantly being implemented. Eligibility has always been a rambunctious topic within the college sports world, and there’s been another shakeup regarding eligibility for junior college athletes.
The National Collegiate Athletic Association granted a waiver that gives JUCO transfers one additional year of eligibility for the 2025-26 season only if the 2024-25 season was supposed to be their final year of eligibility.
JUCO is a term that refers to two-year community colleges. Typically, JUCO athletes play a maximum of two years before transferring to a four-year college or university and using their remaining two years of NCAA eligibility.
A recent lawsuit between Vanderbilt University quarterback Diego Pavia and the NCAA resulted in a Tennessee judge granting Pavia and other senior JUCO transfers an extra year to play.
This ruling affects two players on the Utah Tech University baseball team who were JUCO transfers. First baseman Aaron Perez, a senior recreation and sports management major from Santa Ana, California, and outfielder Hunter Katschke, a senior criminal justice major from Las Vegas. Both hit above a .240 batting average and have played in at least 30 games this season.
Perez grew up in Santa Ana, which is about 32 miles southeast of Los Angeles. He grew up playing baseball with his cousin and started playing travel ball when he was 12 years old. He had zero offers at the end of his senior year of high school and took a walk-on spot at California State University, Bakersfield.
“[College] baseball wasn’t my goal until maybe fifteen, sixteen,” he said. “College coaches kept telling me, ‘You have a future in college baseball,’ and it made me work harder to strive for it.”
Perez said he struggled during his time in Bakersfield and transferred to Cypress Community College in Cypress, California. It was after his sophomore season there that he earned a scholarship to return to Division I at Utah Tech.
“I don’t think I’ve ever worked as hard as I did at JUCO,” he said. “It was a good experience for me. [The] coaches coached me hard and… taught me how to believe in myself. I just strongly recommend JUCO. I think it’s gotten [a lot of guys] where they want to go.”
His path ended up taking him to Utah Tech at the beginning of his junior season, thanks to head coach Chris Pfatenhauer. During his 13-year tenure, Pfatenhauer has made recruiting junior college athletes a priority.
“A lot of bigger schools are going after [transfer] portal guys, which is leaving some of the better junior college players available,” he said. “We’re really trying to focus on that and attack that avenue of the recruiting system.”
That avenue helped him recruit Katschke. His situation was similar to Perez’s, in that he was also committed to play at a Division I school before taking the JUCO route. He knew from a young age he wanted to play college baseball and played for Basic High School in Henderson, Nevada, and committed to the University of Nevada, Las Vegas before deciding it wasn’t the right fit for him. His sophomore season took him to the College of Southern Nevada.
“[That team] is such a tight-knit group,” he said. “I still look at all those kids like brothers. I still talk with all the coaches.”
Katschke said his childhood love of the game fueled him wanting to play for as long as he could. His time at CSN helped that love grow.
“I can definitely say that junior college helps people decide if the game is what they really want to do or not,” Katschke said. “[It’s] the route that some of the grittiest players in the game take. It’s tough on your body, it’s tough on the mind. I think that I would have to say the best players I’ve ever really known came from JUCO.”
