Now that Brian O’Connor has Bob Irsayed his way out of town, the odd silence about that one really uncomfortable thing about his tenure as the UVA Baseball coach – two words: Karl Kuhn – is beginning to lift.
If you’re a long-time UVA Baseball fan reading this story, you at least know the name.
First, to the good: Kuhn was O’Connor’s pitching coach from 2004-2019, the first 15 years of BOC’s tenure, and his pitching staffs put up some good numbers, ranking in the Top 20 nationally in staff ERA nine times, with a #1 ranking in 2011, a #2 ranking in 2014, and four #3s (2005, 2006, 2007, 2009).
He had 41 pitchers drafted, with six making it to the big leagues, notable there, Sean Doolittle, a two-time All-Star closer who won a World Series with the Washington Nationals in 2019.
One thing that stood out about him was his approach to the mound visit – his arm extended to one of his pitcher’s shoulders, and pulling down, almost like he was trying to exert clear physical control over the situation.
It would emerge later, after Kuhn left UVA in 2019 to take the head coach job at Radford, where he would only last three seasons, that there was indeed something controlling to Karl Kuhn’s manner.
The official word on Kuhn and Radford is that he resigned, though he had just signed a two-year contract extension running through the 2027 season, so him just up and quitting didn’t make sense on its own.
The background to the resignation was already out there: Kuhn had been under investigation by the human resources department at Radford, after The Roanoke Times had reported that Kuhn had “created what they described as an atmosphere of mental and verbal abuse that occasionally turned physical.”
A former player, Jordan Peyton, later filed suit against Kuhn and Radford’s athletics director, Robert Lineburg, alleging that Kuhn had created a culture of racism, demonstrated blatant disregard for his players’ mental health – telling Peyton, who told the coach that he was suffering from depression from the stress of his freshman season, “If you feel like cutting your head off with a pair of scissors, let me know” – and that Kuhn retaliated against a group of players, including Peyton, for taking their concerns to the school’s administration.
I tell you that story to then tell you this story: I’ve been in touch with people associated with the UVA Baseball program from Kuhn’s tenure on Grounds, and I’ve kinda been getting hell for not addressing the Kuhn situation more in-depth years ago.
One said: “You don’t think he started acting that way at Radford, do you?”
Players were routinely subjected to tirades from Kuhn that he would later write off as “hard coaching.
“It was a living hell,” was among the characterizations that were shared with me.
Of note: Kuhn is back in baseball as a D1 head coach, at Charleston Southern, which first brought him on as the pitching coach in 2023, and he was named to replace the head coach there, Marc McMillan, after McMillan put up four straight losing seasons.
Odd move there, hiring an assistant who was part of the losing to fix the losing.
Odder still, Year 1 worked out OK for Charleston Southern, which went 31-22 and finished third in the Big South.
The local media down there in South Carolina haven’t touched the subject of his departure from Radford or the damning allegations in the lawsuit, and I can’t find any reporting from the folks down that way on any issues arising behind the scenes at CSU.
Let’s hope for the best there.
As far as his UVA tenure is concerned, I’m collecting stories, and none of them are good.
One father of a former player who I spoke with today wanted to know how it was that no one in the UVA media never bothered to ask Brian O’Connor about his former right-hand man.
And my answer is: that’s a fair question.
“How could he have not seen what had to have been going on right under his nose?” I was asked.
Again, fair question.
We didn’t do our jobs.
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Chris Graham
