In short, Tech recruiting has improved immensely since the Szefc era began (see the orange-highlighted column in the table below). However, our recruiting classes have only just started to sneak into the top 25 in the nation. We're sitting in a bit of a golden region where our recruiting is raking in a high number of quality, impact players and they're mostly making it to campus. Whereas schools like Vanderbilt and LSU lose 3-4 of their top recruits every year to the draft. It's tough to recruit high-end talent with the potential roster holes that can form if someone has a great senior year (like Morabito last year) and then you have to reevaluate roster construction. And for a team like VT losing even one top recruit can hurt. Our recruiting is certainly getting better, but our development under Elbin and Fecteau cannot be understated. We aren't bringing in a high number of elite recruits every year yet we are projected to have at least one player drafted in the first round for 3 straight years (Cross '22, Hurley '23, DeMartini '24). We'll see if that holds up, but nonetheless the pro talent factory that Szefc and co. have built in Blacksburg is garnering serious attention. Guys are coming to campus without even getting a look as a high school draftee, and coming out as highly sought after early round pro talent. It should be mentioned that we're probably doing a better job molding position players than pitchers, but there's reason to be hopeful for the future of our pitching development. High school pitchers are incredibly tough to project. MLB teams have been taking high school pitchers in the draft less and less due to the HUGE risk they present in ever reaching their potential let alone making the major leagues. To quote the best talent evaluators of prospects for almost half a century in Baseball America, "For a decade’s worth of drafts, from 2003-13, the best high school righties rarely, if ever, turned out to be the ones taken at the top. It’s a trend that is continuing, and one that is causing teams to adjust how they view the demographic.". High school pitchers are often judged based on mph, motion of their delivery, and physical frame. The stats in high school are highly skewed with little predictability value due to the variance in the talent level of hitters faced. Without Trackman data this is all tough to judge without getting eyes on players over several innings. High school players have been known to improve dramatically over the course of one season and rocket up draft/recruiting boards. However, most of them are already verbally committed to a school by sophomore/junior year making it even tougher to evaluate their skills with only a year or two of high school play to go off of. To further the point that high school recruiting is often highly inaccurate, let's take a look at some of the best college pitchers this year, so far. We can look at their Perfect Game recruiting rank to see what type of recruits turn into the best college pitchers (Table 2 below). Out of 7 of the top performing pitchers in the nation, only 2 were even top 100 high school recruits. (Yes I included Coleman Picard after he ruined my Friday a few weeks back). Most of the top pitchers in the nation were from the 2020 class. If we take a peak and see where the top 5 high school pitching recruits ended up, Mick Abel (2nd highest pitching recruit in 2020 class) is the only guy there who appears to actually be worthy of the praise he received as a high schooler. Carson Montgomery (5th highest pitching recruit) looks likely to be drafted in the 2nd round this year, but he isn't having a great start to the season at Florida State. The other 3 were drafted in 2020, but aren't even in the top 10 prospects for their respective organization and don't look likely to contribute in a major way to the MLB club. Obviously the rankings for high school pitching recruits don't correlate well to college performance or even pro performance. Now let's take a look at VT pitcher recruiting and see how we compare. I've added tables with our weekend starters (3rd table) for 2023 as well as our top 3 high school pitching recruits from the last 7 years (4th table). No high-end recruits in the weekend rotation, but Drue has done enough to likely get his name called in the 3-5 round range with his 65 stuff+ slider and 55 stuff+ sinker. Tech's high school pitcher recruiting reflects what we knew about the recruiting getting better under Szefc. The average recruiting rank of the top 3 pitchers in the class has for the most part improved year over year. Surely there are some names there you recognize for their contributions in maroon, but there's a few you may have to google to figure out whatever happened to them. The '22 class is still cutting their teeth, but I'm excited that they can show how deep a pitching class the '22 haul was for us by next year. The '23 class bodes 2 top of the line guys with a real risk of not making it to campus. We have to hope Dickerson doesn't get first or second round money and considers waiting a couple years to get a higher bonus, otherwise he's as good as gone. I am relatively new to evaluating high school talent, so anyone who sees holes in my understanding feel free to correct me. My understanding is based off of following the Red Sox farm system and the top minor league prospects heavily for years. I've only just begun looking at college recruiting using Perfect Game metrics and evaluations/rankings over the last 3 years. My overall understanding is maybe slightly better than average.