Long, odd trip ending for Pitt’s Brown
‘He has given us his very best effort to the best of his ability every day.’
For years, Victor Soares made what became a familiar trip, driving nine hours from his home in Rhode Island to Pittsburgh to see his grandson, Terrell Brown, play for the Pitt men’s basketball team. The destination made the journey worth it. Since Brown started playing basketball, Soares didn’t miss a game, home or away, racking up miles across New England and beyond. When Brown began his career with Pitt in 2017, he saw no reason to stop.
“I love watching him play,” Soares said. “I’m just waiting for that game where he’ll break out or have an explosive game to work on his confidence. It kept me coming back.”
It was hope and love that carried Soares through all of those 1,110-mile round-trip treks, but it was also persistence, a belief in what he was doing, why he was doing it and why it should continue.
That same attribute has helped shape his grandson.
The next week will be the final one of Brown’s Pitt career, a stretch of at least two games that begins Saturday with a matchup against Clemson. In his four seasons at the school, Brown has been a constant in a program defined by change. One head coach was fired and another was hired. Twenty-eight different scholarship players graced the roster at some point. Even the Panthers’ logos, colors and uniforms underwent makeovers. Of the seven freshmen who arrived at Pitt in 2017 as part of then-coach Kevin Stallings’ 11player recruiting class, Brown is the only one who remains.
At a time of turbulence, when he had nearly every reason to leave, he stayed. Despite his modest statistics this season — 2.6 points and 2.5 rebounds in 10.8 minutes per game — Brown’s continued, unwavering presence has cemented his place as one of the more unique figures in one of the most trying, unsettled four-year runs in the program’s history.
“I appreciate everything I’ve been through, all the hard times,” Brown said. “I don’t feel like I’d be the same person if I didn’t go through it.”
Those hard times were ones that Brown
couldn’t have imagined when he committed to Pitt in September 2016, two months before the first game of Stallings’ ill-fated two-year tenure. He wasn’t sure what exactly awaited him and even seriously considered redshirting his first season to aid his physical development, but he and his fellow freshmen were excited about the unknown.
That hopeful feeling was short-lived, getting quickly and repeatedly squashed over an unforgiving four-month period. A group that was remarkably short on experience — and didn’t have the prodigious talent to compensate for that youth — went 8-24 overall and lost all 19 of its ACC games, contests decided by an average of 19 points. Fewer than 48 hours after their final game, Stallings was fired.
“It was mentally draining,” Brown said. “We were very high-spirit guys. We weren’t negative. This was all our first year in college. We were all experiencing
everything at once. It didn’t help that the season was going the way it was going. For me, that kind of had an effect on me as a person.”
While much of the ire that season was directed at Stallings, an unpopular hire whose lack of success never endeared him to a Pitt fan base accustomed to regular NCAA tournament appearances, it was difficult for players like Brown to not feel the brunt of some of that displeasure.
“People may have been quick to judge,” Soares said. “The collateral damage is the student-athlete. They’re the ones who paid for it.”
With the coach they came to play for gone, that group of freshmen slowly and steadily eroded. Marcus Carr and Parker Stewart transferred within a month of Jeff Capel’s hiring, ending up at Minnesota and Tennessee-Martin, respectively. That December, and with their playing time significantly down or virtually non-existent,
Shamiel Stevenson and Peace Ilegomah followed suit. At the end of Capel’s first season, Khameron Davis left for Weber State and at the end of the coach’s second season, Samson George graduated early and transferred to Central Arkansas.
Brown had his own doubts, the murky moments when he questioned if a better alternative existed for him away from the school that had become home. Ultimately, he trusted the incoming coaching staff enough and opted to stay.
His teammates who had exited the program did so for wholly understandable and ultimately beneficial reasons. Several players transferred to lower levels of the sport, where they were given more playing time and bigger roles than they would have had with the Panthers. Carr found his way to the Big Ten, where he has developed into one of the best point guards in college
basketball. Stewart, Brown’s former roommate with whom he still talks every day, got the opportunity to play for his father, Anthony Stewart, whose sudden death last November at age 50 shook the sport (Stewart has since transferred from UT-Martin to Indiana).
Brown had different motivations, though — different feelings pulling him in a different direction.
“I’m not going to leave because that’s not who I am as a person,” he said. “I don’t want to be looked at as someone that, when it got hard, I turned around and left. That’s not how I am. I’m going to stick it out, regardless of whether it’s bad or good.”
Choosing to remain at Pitt didn’t necessarily provide a smoother path.
Even as the Panthers improved their win total in each of the next two years, Brown and some of his teammates languished at times, eliciting sometimes sharp criticism. Halfway through his sophomore season, he deleted most of his social media accounts. During the early weeks of the COVID-19 pandemic last year, he got rid of Instagram. He only uses Snapchat now, and that’s just to communicate with family. His years at Pitt had taught him lessons about human behavior, about how praise after a good game can become vitriol after a poor one mere days later.
It’s something Brown said fundamentally changed and hardened his personality.
“I felt like that was a distraction,” Brown said. “I would look and see people say stuff. I would think to myself, ‘Am I this bad? Do I do this wrong?’ At that point, it was just being toxic in my life.”
There were also challenges on the court. He had to acclimate to a new coach with his own ideas for what niche the 6-foot-10 center might occupy. That transition wasn’t always straightforward.
“What do you build on from that? Nothing,” Soares said. “It’s like starting all over. You’re going back to step one all over again. It’s a tough situation for these kids.”
After averaging just shy of 20 minutes per game as a sophomore and junior, Brown saw his playing time fall considerably early this season, with Abdoul Karim Coulibaly in a starting role and four-star freshman John Hugley taking most of the remaining minutes on the low post. In Pitt’s first seven games, Brown played just 35 minutes.
It was a dip he said hit him hard mentally. He wasn’t the only person to feel that way.
“This year was a little heartbreaking for me,” Soares said. “I thought he was going to get more playing time. He was so close to coming to Number 2 in shot blocks. Then, all of a sudden, you see him not playing and the minutes shrinking. What do you do?”
As the season has progressed, that situation has changed because of factors within and well beyond Brown’s control.
Hugley was indefinitely suspended from the team Jan. 15, making Brown the team’s No. 2 center. His play has been inconsistent over the past seven weeks, but there are games in which he has showcased his best abilities, namely blocking or altering shots. In a loss last Sunday at N.C. State, Brown had his first career doubledouble, scoring 11 points and pulling down 11 rebounds against one of the ACC’s biggest frontcourts.
For his coaches, outings like that are an overdue reward.
“For Terrell, you’re the sole survivor here,” said Pitt associate head coach Tim O’Toole, the assistant coach who works most frequently with Brown. “It wasn’t easy. And yet this was our opportunity to thank you for all that you tried. You’re going to have wins and losses in there. You’re going to have good moments and bad moments. But at the end of this thing, you stuck it out. You tried your best. You gave us every ounce of effort that you could.”
Over the past few weeks, Brown has found a sense of peace that once eluded him. About a month ago, he began meditating, something he believes has helped him relax, become more self-assured and improve his play. Even before that, he had embraced his role, becoming a more vocal leader and offering constant support from the Panthers’ sideline. He’ll be remembered at Pitt for more than just his resilience. With one more block, he’ll tie Sam Clancy for third on the program’s career blocks list.
The end of the 2020-21 season will mark the end of his Pitt career. He’s set to graduate this semester and was the lone senior player honored before the Panthers’ win Tuesday against Wake Forest. He might be playing next season, possibly at another college, but it won’t be at Pitt.
Before that happens, he got a proper send-off. As his name was announced over the Petersen Events Center’s public-address system Tuesday, he came out of a tunnel and was mobbed by a group of teammates waiting for
him on the court. In a building in which he and his team were booed three years ago while leaving the court in a lopsided senior-day loss against Virginia, he was now being embraced.
He had earned it.
“When I talked to him Saturday morning, I was like, ‘Let’s look back on this thing now with where you started and where you’re at today. Here you are. You’re still swinging and trying and fighting in the best league in college basketball. There’s still opportunity right in front of you. Let’s make the most of it,’” O’Toole said. “The neat thing is that he is. I’m just proud of him — his character, he has stuck it out. He has given us his very best effort to the best of his ability every day. As a coach, really, what more can you ask?”