When it came to describing his experience with COVID-19, there was no point in sugar-coating matters for Jeff Capel. There were no generalities about enduring challenges and overcoming obstacles that evaded or didn’t accurately reflect the moments of misery he withstood.
“It was a bitch, to be honest with you,” the Pitt men’s basketball coach said Monday. “It was tough.”
Capel is through it now, feeling “a lot better.” Life was coming back to normal, or at least as normal as it could be in such abnormal times. He returned to overseeing the Panthers’ practices and was all set to be back on the sideline Tuesday night against Duke, his alma mater, before that game was suddenly postponed because of a positive test within the Pitt program.
The physical and mental strain that the coronavirus ravaged upon him, however, aren’t likely to be forgotten by him, at least not anytime soon.
Though he ultimately didn’t require hospitalization, Capel, a standout point guard at Duke in the mid-1990s, said he was close to it. He felt many of the symptoms associated with the virus. Then there was the matter of being quarantined and isolated from those closest to him, a necessary medical step that came with its own devastating toll.
“I understand a little bit better now of why solitary confinement is a form of punishment,” Capel said. “I understand why Tom Hanks painted a volleyball and turned it into Wilson [in the 2000 film Cast Away] and why he lost his mind when Wilson went away. It’s difficult.”
Taxing as the past week and a half has been for Capel, he acknowledges that he’s fortunate. This is a virus, after all, that has killed about 330,000 people in the United State and has sent many more to the hospital, a fate Capel was ultimately able to avoid.
The severity of the coronavirus was never lost on Capel. Prior to testing positive for COVID-19, which was announced Dec. 19 and caused him to miss Pitt’s 64-54 loss against Louisville on Dec. 22, he had previously expressed skepticism about charging forward with a college basketball season in the middle of a global pandemic.
Experiencing what exactly COVID-19 can do to an individual — at the relatively young age of 45, no less — didn’t strengthen that belief. He didn’t need to have the coronavirus to feel the way he does.
“I just think that when you look around at what’s going on in the country with this virus and this disease and you see the impact it’s having on people, that it’s having on families, that it’s having on our country and you listen to people talking about not traveling or doing these things, it just doesn’t feel right, especially at our level,” Capel said.
That distinction about the level at which he coaches is notable. As part of his Dec. 7 comments on playing during a pandemic, Capel said he doesn’t believe major college athletes can be called amateurs any longer, particularly as they continue to play while some smaller conferences have canceled their basketball seasons and even some of the largest conferences pushed back their non-revenue sports’ seasons.
That, along with the decentralized power structure that exists in college sports, has made an already uncertain, unstable situation that much murkier.
“The players aren’t getting paid to do this,” Capel said. “It’s different to me when you’re a professional athlete. That’s different. That’s your job and you can make a choice whether you want to do it. On the professional level, the rules are the same for each team. The leagues determine what the protocols are. Our protocols are all across the board. You’ve got some teams that test every day. You’ve got some teams that test three times a week. You have some conferences that do something different. I don’t think we should be playing right now.”
It’s also difficult, if not impossible, for Capel to think of his own circumstance without looking at what else has transpired across college basketball over the past several weeks.
One story stands out above all others. Florida forward Keyontae Johnson collapsed during his team’s Dec. 12 game against Florida State and spent the next 10 days in the hospital. Johnson, a projected first-round NBA draft pick, was reportedly diagnosed with acute myocarditis, an inflammation of the heart that has been linked to COVID-19. The 6-foot-5 junior, a close friend of Pitt wing Au’Diese Toney, was reportedly among a group of Florida players who had tested positive for the virus earlier this year.
It’s a high-profile case that, to Capel, underlines an important point — that the effects of COVID-19 don’t necessarily end once someone who previously tested positive returns to their everyday life.
“It’s absolutely amazing to me that’s not a bigger story,” Capel said.
Craig Meyer: cmeyer@post-gazette.com and Twitter @CraigMeyerPG
First Published: December 29, 2020, 11:00 a.m.
