A lot has changed in less than a year for Brandin “Beebah” Cummings.
The Midland, Pa. native was running practice as a senior leader at Lincoln Park and just 10 months ago won a third WPIAL Championship on the very hardwood where he would eventually drop a career-high 30 points in just his eleventh collegiate game on Wednesday.
“ACC basketball is a lot different from WPIAL basketball,” Cummings said on Wednesday night. “My coaches and my teammates, they’ve done their best to prepare me for that transition. I feel like I’ve been transitioning pretty well and I can’t wait to make the next step forward.”
While it’s a new process going from high school to college, Cummings has quickly warmed up to the challenge. As the true freshman deals with the changes, his success comes from a place that has been instilled in him for years.
“Hours and hours and hours of work in the gym. I’m always going to rely on my work. If I hit a few shots and I feel good, you’re going to see me out there looking confident,” Cummings said.
That work ethic and character was something Pitt basketball head coach Jeff Capel noticed immediately.
“Beebah’s” been confident since the first time I saw him,” Capel said. “He’s a really really confident kid and the confidence comes I think because of the work. He’s a gym rat. He’s one of the most low-maintenance guys I’ve coached. He’s an unbelievable teammate. He’s a sponge, like he wants to learn and wants to be really good and he puts the time in.”
Earlier Wednesday, hours before tipoff against non-conference Eastern Kentucky, Cummings was exactly where you would expect to find him: putting extra work in on the court.
“I got here a little early for our shoot around today and he was shooting with Milan [Brown] before shoot around,” Capel said. “We were really trying to work with him on his shot preparation. It’s different when you go up levels trying to get more force for him to have his feet ready and getting ready to shoot and jumping straight up and down.”
Those extra hours paid off in a big way for Cummings. The 6-3 guard scored 30 points in a 96-56 win against EKU, the most by a Pitt freshman off the bench in program history, and it came on a 76.9 percent clip from the floor (10-of-13), along with six triples.
“I felt good. As a scorer, you know whenever it’s your night. Whenever I first touched the rock tonight, I knew it was my night,” Cummings said.
Through the first 10 games of the 2024 season, Cummings surpassed double digits just twice with 11 points in the season opener and 12 against Mississippi State.
The young guard was thrust into action early against the Colonels with starting point guard Jaland Lowe picking up a quick two fouls. Cummings met the test by scoring Pitt’s first 12 points of the game.
“Me and Jaland are really close. We live together, so I see him every day, talk to him every day. This is exactly what he would want me to go out there and do. My job on the team is to be the best backup point guard. I think he’s the best point guard in the country. He knows I’m prepared to go out there and do what he does, so I think we’re both happy I was able to go out there and do that,” Cummings said.
Cummings was shooting the ball with confidence and as more shots fell, especially from beyond the arc, the comfortability set in.
“My teammates did an amazing job of putting me in situations where they know I’m comfortable scoring the ball, so it really made it easy on me to go out there and do that. All the credit goes to them,” Cummings said.
For his Pitt teammates, they knew it was only a matter of time before Cummings would break out with an impressive performance like the one on Wednesday.
“On his visit,” Zack Austin said on when he first knew Cummings could score as he did. “He had came and I didn’t know who “Beebah” was. I had just got here so I didn’t know all the lore of Pittsburgh. Like I said before the season started, he is one of the best scorers I’ve played with. He was hitting some tough shots. I was thinking in my head, ‘This not his body.’ I wasn’t thinking this was him and then we played in the summer and he was still hitting them shots and I was like, ‘That’s him. Nothing you can do with him.”
On top of the spectacular outing for Cummings, it came as his older brother and former Panther, Nelly, made his broadcasting debut on the ACC Network Extra broadcast.
“I think he told me yesterday or maybe the day before. To have him there was a great feeling, but to also have my family there supporting me, it’s something I’ve dreamed of since I was a kid. I’ve always wanted to come to this school and play in this arena. It made me feel really at home to know that I had my brother over there doing what he’s doing and my family there supporting me.”
