Coaching hard suits Capel fine
But players must see he cares first
There’s a formula to what Jeff Capel does, a method to what can sometimes seem like madness.
Coaching a group of 12 to 15 college-age basketball players with varying temperaments and disparate backgrounds is a delicate, perpetually challenging task, something Capel learned throughout his life as the son of a coach. What could seem like a convoluted balancing act to many is, to him, a philosophy that seems simple in principle, but is anything but in practice — if your players know you care about them, they’ll allow you to coach them hard.
It’s an approach that has shaped him into the coach he is today and is something he has used in his nearly nine months on the job at Pitt, where he is now nine games into his first season. For a team that heads into its game Saturday at West Virginia with a somewhat surprising 7-2 mark, even if that record most recently included an unsightly loss to Niagara Monday, it’s an ideology that has taken hold.
“You have to constantly remind them — this is all of our guys, not just freshmen — it’s not personal,” Capel said Thursday. “It’s not personal. I want all of you, but I’m going to tell you the truth. I have a rule: You can ask me anything, but I’m going to tell you the truth and you may not like the answer. But if you ask me, I’m going to tell you the truth. I think that’s how you coach.”
Capel’s tough love and uncompromising honesty is nothing new, as he used them throughout the offseason as instruments in the early stages of his rebuilding effort. Now that games have begun and a body of work has been established for a team featuring five newcomers among its top seven
players in minutes per game, its effects have started to show.
On some days and in some practices — like the ones following the one-point home loss against Niagara, a game junior Malik Ellison said Thursday they “took for granted” — it’s more evident than others. The feeling-out process has largely ended, though, thanks in large part to that transparency. Coach and player alike know where they stand, even if it leads to moments of discomfort.
“From day one, he just said as long as we go out there and we work every day, everything else will take care of itself,” Ellison said. “We’ve just got to come each and every day ready to work. We’ve had days we weren’t ready to work, and he got on us, and we had to run. Just from that I could always tell how serious of a dude he was.”
“Nobody else is going to be able to get their voice as loud as him,” senior Jared Wilson Frame added. “Nobody is going to be able to speak over him. No matter where you are — if you’re outside the doors of the gym and especially if you’re inside the gym — all eyes are going to be on him when he starts speaking. He has a really strong and powerful voice.”
Capel often praises his players as passionately as he pans them, something he believes is necessary in relationship building. His father — the late Jeff Capel Jr., a former head coach at Old Dominion and North Carolina A&T, among other places — told him only 15 to 20 percent of a college head coach’s job is the Xs-andOs strategy that seems so central to their occupation. Much of the rest, he was told, came down to recruiting and building the kind of genuine bonds with players that allow you to coax the most talent and productivity out of them as you can.
As time goes on, that can sometimes be more difficult to do. Capel said recruits and players now are much different even than they were five years ago, when that group of recruits and players were much different than the ones that preceded it five years earlier and so on.
“Our sport is so different in the recruitment of the kids that we have that we get in men’s basketball,” Capel said. “It’s very different, I think, from any other sport. In our sport, a lot of times, they don’t have anyone that’s telling them the truth. They hear a lot of praise and a lot of ‘great,’ so sometimes when you get them here, the first time someone has gotten on them, you may be the first one that has done that. The reactions are interesting.”
Even as those years pass, Capel — who is only 43 — still likes to see himself as relatable. By almost any measurement, he succeeds in that quest. After all, Capel (while an assistant at Duke) was photographed earlier this year with rapper 2 Chainz, saw Tupac Shakur famously wear his Duke jersey in the mid1990s, and spent Wednesday night in Cleveland with his young son, Elijah, hanging courtside with Kevin Durant and Steph Curry before the Cavaliers’ game against Golden State.
That relatability has its limits. Wilson-Frame smiled as he talked about how Capel tells his players about the bounce and athleticism he had as a player, something that’s met with an internal laugh from his players.
“He’s very relatable for everybody on this team, and that’s the beauty of it, we feel like we can talk to him about anything, just about life in general, not just basketball, and that’s important to have,” Ellison said.
The more superfluous aspects of relatability have a shelf life. It’s part of the reason that Capel admires certain coaches who have been able to excel in their profession as long as they have. He’ll match wits with one such person Saturday in West Virginia’s Bob Huggins, the seventh alltime winningest coach in Division I men’s basketball history. In some ways, Huggins stands as the coach he aspires to be, between his years on the job and his far-reaching accolades. In other ways, based on what his players say, Capel’s not terribly different.
“The thing I’ve always admired is how his players love him and he coaches them hard,” Capel said. “I mean really, really hard. But they know that he loves them and because of that, they love him. And he’s able to coach them hard, he’s able to push them, he’s able to at times take it to the edge, but they know he really and truly cares about them. I’ve always felt that’s the sign of a really good coach is how loyal players are to him.”