Coastal Carolina baseball coach rips Florida counterpart during NCAA regionals

Coastal Carolina baseball coach Kevin Schnall ripped his colleague and counterpart, Florida's Kevin O'Sullivan, to a rare degree over the weekend. And their teams never even played one another. 

The backstory: Coastal Carolina, seeded 13th in the NCAA baseball tournament, hosted a regional that included East Carolina, Florida, and Fairfield. Coastal Carolina defeated East Carolina 18-7 in the winner's bracket game on Saturday night in a game that did not end until just before midnight. 

That result pushed East Carolina into an elimination game with Florida that was scheduled to begin at noon, but field conditions pushed first pitch back an hour. According to local accounts, O'Sullivan felt this was an artificial delay to give ECU more recovery time.

Asked to explain the situation after his game, an 11-4 loss that ended the Gators' season, O'Sullivan declined.

And here was the situation O'Sullivan declined to explain, according to one local account.

Florida coach Kevin O’Sullivan was very upset with the schedule change for today. He ripped into the NCAA staff here in Conway. He also reportedly had things to say to the Pirates as they crossed the field this morning. Should be interesting!

— Brian Bailey (@bbaileywnct) June 1, 2025

After his team beat East Carolina to advance to the Super Regionals, Coastal head coach Schnall criticized O'Sullivan (while not mentioning him by name) and defended the CCU staff.

“Another coach disrespected our associate AD, who works as hard as anybody in our entire program,” Schnall said. “He disrespected our field crew, who are the salt of the earth. These guys would do anything for our program. It’s not OK. This needs to be brought up. Absolutely disrespectful.

“As a coach, it’s our job to mentor young kids and the way he treated the two site reps, the way he treated our associate AD, the way he treated our field crew is absolutely unacceptable. That’s what I’m most disappointed about. This is a national champion coach who thinks he can come in here and try to bully people around.

"I’m disappointed. Somebody that a lot of coaches look up to, for him to act that way, I’m really disappointed. He disrespected a hall-of-fame coach who’s the site rep here. That’s all I’ve got to say.”

With the win, Coastal Carolina will now face No. 4 seed Auburn this weekend for a shot at the College World Series. 

Update: O'Sullivan has now apologized for his outburst. Florida released a statement Monday evening from him and AD Scott Stricklin.