Parents with kids signed up for summer camps with UVA Baseball have been notified that, due to the coaching change, there won’t be summer camps this year, which is understandable.
What’s not understandable: even though they’re getting their camp registration fees refunded, they’re not going to get the $48 service fee refunded.
“I am writing to inform you that all summer baseball camps at the University of Virginia will be cancelled, due to the coaching staff change. We understand that this may be very disappointing to your son and appreciate your understanding. You will be fully reimbursed for your registration fee. However, Atlantic Coast Camps is not responsible for the transaction service fee that was charged for online registrations,” parents of campers learned by email last week.
“This is poor form,” a reader whose grandson was enrolled in camp for a second year told me by email over the weekend.
The “poor form” here would appear to be on the part of the former coach, Brian O’Connor, whose company, the aforementioned Atlantic Coast Camps LLC, owns and operates the camp, which isn’t affiliated with UVA Athletics, aside from it being associated with the now-former UVA Baseball coach and using UVA facilities.
This is standard in a coach’s contract at UVA, which gives its coaches the right to conduct summer camps “using available University facilities in accordance with University regulations and policies, and pursuant to a standard University lease,” with a proviso that “the Coach agrees to reimburse the University for all reasonable expenses incurred by the University in connection with facility usage for the summer camp.”
In essence, the coach, in this case, O’Connor, rents the facilities from UVA Athletics, in a business arrangement in which his company pockets the registration fees.
This is one way for coaches to make extra money in the summer months, and is probably a bigger deal for the coaches in the lower-revenue sports, where the salaries aren’t in the million-plus range, like O’Connor was getting – he actually made $1.4 million in the 2024-2025 academic sports year, under the terms of the contract extension that he signed just last summer.
O’Connor left UVA not a full year into that new deal for a $2.9 million-a-year deal at Mississippi State.
ICYMI
That staggering amount of money is what is hitting the camp parents forced to eat the registration fee the wrong way.
“My grandson has been looking forward to this camp for over a year,” the reader who tipped me off to what is going on here wrote in an email. “He came and stayed with us last year and did the camp, and it was a great experience. I know the coaches and the baseball players are all moving, and life is busy, but I think it’s tragic that the hopes and dreams of hundreds of young people who want to play baseball took a big dent when they decided to cancel the camps.”
The very least that O’Connor could do, given the circumstances, would be to reimburse the families for the service fees.
Back of the envelope math suggests that we’d be talking, what, at most, $10,000, give or take.
Ten thousand to a guy who makes $2.9 million a year is $300 to somebody who makes $90,000 – the median household income in Virginia.
The camp fees are no longer listed on the website, but a Google search tells me that they started at $350 and went as high as $899, depending on the age group and boarding situation.
The hit on O’Connor would be less to him, on scale, than what he was charging parents to get their kids into his camp.
He needs to do the right thing here.
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Chris Graham
