UVA Football: What about that elevated gameday experience we were promised?

Remember how UVA Athletics announced back in May that it had hired a company to help with the gameday experience for UVA Football?

Several UVA fans asked me what I know about what that company, REVEL^XP, has been up to on that, given that it doesn’t seem that the gameday experience has been all that different from years past.

It was for that reason that I reached out to UVA Athletics to see if I could speak with someone from the company, or with Tyler Jones, the deputy AD for external operations in the athletics department, to learn more about the ongoing work on gameday stuff.

I was advised by an athletics department spokesperson that I’d need to request information on REVEL^XP from the Freedom of Information Act office at the University.

I don’t know right off what I’d even ask the FOIA folks for, other than a copy of the contract between UVA Athletics and RevelXP, which, I presume, would spell out what RevelXP is supposed to be doing.

Jones, in a quote from the news release from May 30 announcing the hire of REVEL^XP, said the athletics department had “invested several months studying strategies to enhance the fan experience at Scott Stadium and several of our athletics venues. We are confident that REVEL^XP will help us elevate gameday at Virginia while further engaging UVA fans and the greater Charlottesville community,” which sounded promising.

We’re all still waiting for something resembling results.

A related issue on the UVA Football gameday experience front raised to me by several fans in the past few days has to do with concessions.

I wrote about my own not good experience with the concessions offerings at last week’s UVA-Louisville game, at which I bought two hot dogs that looked to have been leftovers from the Dick Bestwick era.

What I really wanted was a Gus Burger, but The Gus Bus, associated with the popular Corner restaurant The Spot, wasn’t there.

I found out why, from an email from Bert Ellis, a double-‘Hoo alum and member of the University of Virginia Board of Visitors.

Ellis is one of the owners of The Spot, and he was the one responsible for having The Gus Bus set up inside the stadium at football games the past couple of football seasons.

According to Ellis, the reason The Gus Bus won’t be back anymore is Aramark, the Philadelphia-based $10.4 billion market cap food-service juggernaut, which is in charge of running stadium venues at all UVA Athletics events.

“I quit bringing The Gus Bus to Scott Stadium after the BC game because they will not pay us independent food vendors per their payment terms and will not even give us an accurate accounting of what we sold,” Ellis told me.

“All of the indie food vendors have to sell through an Aramark POS system, and we have to rely on them to get an accounting for what we sold,” Ellis said, adding that Aramark and UVA Athletics get “a third off the top of the food vendors’ revenue.”

“Collectively, we are small potatoes, but my experience with them is one more indictment of the whole system of UVA Football,” Ellis told me.

I raised the issues presented to me by Ellis to UVA Athletics for confirmation and comment, and the answer was: yes, go to the FOIA office.

At this point, I’m going to need to add Faith Hill, the FOIA officer at UVA, who they keep pushing me off on whenever I ask anything of consequence, to my Christmas card list.