Jeff Capel has been a winner on a variety of levels.
He won a North Carolina high school championship as a player.
As a coach, he came home from international competition, including the 2016 Rio Olympics, with gold medals around his neck.
On Mike Krzyzewski’s staff at Duke, he was part of ACC and national championship teams.
Capel even is 14-5 in overtime games among his 190 victories as a head coach at VCU, Oklahoma and Pitt. College teams don’t regularly win 30 games in a season, but Capel’s Oklahoma team did it in 2009.
All of that winning is good for the soul because he’s not afraid to declare, “Look, I hate losing. I hate it, despise it. I don’t like the feel of it.
“I take them hard. It’s hard for me to move on. I understand you have to.”
Capel never will get accustomed to losing, but he has faced it more frequently in recent weeks as his young Pitt team struggles to learn how to win consistently.
The Panthers (14-9, 5-7 ACC) have lost three of their past four conference games after a 4-4 record through Jan. 22. After uncharacteristically allowing 79 and 80 points in recent losses to Duke and Notre Dame, Pitt welcomes Georgia Tech (11-12, 5-7) to Petersen Events Center at 2 p.m. Saturday. Pitt and Georgia Tech are among five teams in a tie for eighth place in the ACC.
Capel said Friday his winning mindset started when he was 1993 North Carolina high school player of the year and was exposed for all to see as a 27-year-old head coach at VCU in 2002.
Capel was the youngest head coach in college basketball at the time, but he said some people scratched their heads and wondered about it.
“I heard everything,” he said. “When I got that job at 27 at VCU, all I heard was ‘You don’t deserve it. How did this happen? This has to be a joke.’
“I was hell-bent on proving this is not a joke. (I said) ‘I have to be successful. I have to be.’ ”
One day, VCU lost an important game to North Carolina-Wilmington, then coached by current Clemson coach Brad Brownell. People in Richmond still talk about what happened at Capel’s postgame news conference.
“We were horrible,” Capel said Friday. “It was embarrassing. We got our butts kicked.
“I talked about how it looked like I had gotten up that morning and got in a van and just drove around Richmond and picked up some guys and let’s go play.”
Capel smiles at the retelling of the story, but he said he’s a different coach today.
“I’m not that anymore. I’d like to think I’ve grown, but my feeling about losing hasn’t changed,” he said. “I just may show it differently or not show it the way maybe I used to. That’s because kids are different.”
Capel said his 27-year-old self might not survive in today’s game.
“There weren’t as many distractions back then,” he said. “After a game was over with, back then, you didn’t have 13, 14 guys grabbing their phones and they can look at different things on their phones and immediately their minds are off the game.
“There was a little more time back then where young people did dwell on stuff more.”
Back to reality Saturday, with their phones stored away in their lockers, the Panthers get a chance to reverse their losing ways and maybe start climbing back to a .500 record.
Notes: Capel said backup point guard Onyebuchi Ezeakudo has a sprained ankle and won’t play against Georgia Tech. … Guard Ryan Murphy, who has missed the past two games with a concussion, will be a game-time decision.
Get the latest news about Pitt basketball and all things Panthers athletics.
Jerry DiPaola is a Tribune-Review staff writer. You can contact Jerry by email at [email protected] or via Twitter .
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