UTC basketball coach John Shulman

School buses have been in and out of the parking lot at McKenzie Arena in recent days, and packs of tall, tank-top-wearing teenagers have been seen all over the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga campus.

It's boys' basketball camp time at UTC, and despite a not-so-great economy, the turnout for the recent team camps has been strong, Mocs coach John Shulman said Tuesday.

Shulman said he had 64 high school teams participate in last weekend's camp and 60 are attending this week's camp, which wraps up Thursday.

"We were kind of expecting low numbers and we didn't get them," Shulman said. "Right now we're about maxed out, which is great.

"Everybody's talking about 'staycation' and just staying here and spending a couple hundred dollars on camp here instead of spending thousands of dollars and going to the beach."

Shulman's camps aren't the only ones going strong. Women's basketball coach Wes Moore said his Lady Mocs team camp, which begins Thursday, will have 45 teams. Moore said he had 160 players participate in his team camp earlier this month.

Earlier this month, the football program conducted a one-day showcase camp for high school seniors and had 172 participants. There are four more camps scheduled for July -- a junior-senior skills camp, a 7-on-7 camp, a lineman camp and a youth camp -- and coach Russ Huesman said registration for all but the youth camp has gone very well.

Scrappy Moore Field was expected to be unavailable this summer because of construction, but the practice field's face-lift won't happen until after next season. With the additional space available, Huesman said he will be able to add some teams to the 7-on-7 camp. He said he'd put the limit at 16 when he thought Scrappy wasn't going to be available, but now he said that number could go to 24.

"When we got to 16 we had to turn some teams away, but we've already added two and hopefully we can get a few more," he said.

The softball program was scheduled to host an individual camp this week but it was postponed because of a lack of early enrollment. Coach Frank Reed said the camp could have been done based on the number of players who wanted to sign up at the last minute, but because the camp had already been postponed there weren't enough coaches available to run it.

Reed said the lack of early enrollment might have something to do with the economy, but another key factor is that summer is a very busy time for softball and many of the players that might be interested in the camp are involved with travel teams. UTC hosted two softball camps in the winter and Reed said both of those went very well.

Sports camps are great recruiting tools for the university, which will have thousands of prospective students on campus. They're also great for the coaches, who can see firsthand the abilities of prospective recruits and get to know dozens of high school coaches. Camps also provide a nice income boost to the often low-paid assistant coaches who do much of the work running them.

"In the last two weeks we've had 1,300 high school guys on our campus," Shulman said. "There's probably no other way that we would have those kids on this campus at this moment, and it's a great way to build relationships between the kids and (UTC)."