THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Tuesday, October 17, 1995 TAG: 9510170451
SECTION: SPORTS PAGE: C1 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Column
SOURCE: Tom Robinson
LENGTH: Medium: 70 lines
There are gym rats in every town and city, guys who live and love basketball to the virtual exclusion of all else.
For gym rats, there is eating and breathing and maybe sleeping. Then there is basketball.
Gym rats carry a fever; a degree of passion for the game that knows no limits, recognizes no impassable obstacles to their pursuit of basketball fulfillment.
As kids, they wear gloves to dribble and shoot outside in the winter, even when they have no future as players.
As adults, sometimes while they're still in college, they maneuver themselves into coaching jobs. High school JVs at first, then varsity and perhaps college assistant posts if they're living right.
Over the years, they accumulate nothing that won't fit into a car, work around the clock, drive like maniacs on brain-numbing recruiting tours and leave forwarding orders at post offices all over the country.
More times than not, they never get to run their own show - some other lucky-stiff gym rat always noses them out. But they persevere, pleased just to be part of a cast.
Randy Peele, though, he's a lucky rat.
``This is what I feel like I was born to do,'' Peele, a Norfolk native and Virginia Wesleyan graduate, says from Greensboro, where he is two days into his tenure as head coach at North Carolina-Greensboro. ``I'm incredibly fortunate to have this opportunity.''
Peele, 38, parlayed a dozen hard years of college assistantship, and a few seasons at Norfolk Catholic and Portsmouth Catholic before that, into his big chance.
After three years as an assistant for the Spartans, Peele got the job when Mike Dement went to Southern Methodist.
Peele would have gone with Dement had UNC-Greensboro passed on him. Peele, who attended Barry-Robinson when it was a Catholic high school, has bounced around Vermont, Tennessee and North Carolina, acquiring a wife, three children and a reputation as a master recruiter along the way. A move to Texas would have been no big deal.
And it might have happened had not Greensboro's players closed ranks and beseeched the administration to do the right thing and hire Peele.
``What it boils down to is, he's a basketball nut,'' says Virginia Wesleyan athletic director Don Forsyth. ``He was very small and not a great basketball player. But he's one who, as a coach, you love to have him but you knew he wasn't going to play.''
In fact, Forsyth got Peele's coaching career off the ground by cutting him when Peele showed up at Virginia Wesleyan in 1978 after two years at Louisburg (N.C.) College.
As a Virginia Wesleyan junior, Peele went to work for John Carmody at Norfolk Catholic as an assistant girls coach. He has spent every season since on somebody else's sideline.
Now he has his own sideline, the coveted place from which he'll lead a team that came within a buzzer-beater of making the NCAA tournament last year in its fourth Division I season.
Not that Peele will be able to enjoy it. Obsessions are like that.
``I never relax now. My mind's thinking about it all the time,'' Peele says, minutes before starting Monday's second practice session. ``People who are in this are all alike. We're driven to do this.'' ILLUSTRATION: Photo
Randy Peele
by CNB