Pat Good: A new father, an undersized guard and Winthrop’s ultimate comeback kid
It feels like you’re watching the prime-time, 2022 version of Pat Good — the guy who always seems to be hitting a clutch shot over a taller defender to keep Winthrop in a game it has no business being in.
But you aren’t watching this year’s Good. The 24-year-old Good.
Instead, you’re watching a still-good Good, but a young Good. A 2016 senior-in-high-school Good playing in a Tennessee state semifinal. A Good whose jersey is a bit too big, his shorts flowing below his knees as he bounces around the 3-point line and yanks the ball along with him. Finally, he lunges to the corner and rises up for a shot. His defender rises with him, but it’s too late: The 5-foot-8 guard splashes a late-game, go-ahead 3 in his defender’s face, and before you can watch the defender land on Good and knock him to the ground, the video cuts out.
Good has to rewind it on his iPhone so you can watch it again.
“I watch this often,” Good said, his eyes transfixed on his phone.
“I do it because these are the moments that you prepare for,” he continued. “Everybody can hit shots in the first half. You have fresh legs. You’re in a rhythm. … But those critical moments come from hours of preparation. You can’t do that if you don’t put the work in, when nobody is in the gym, when nobody else is watching.”
On Monday, the gym was quiet for the first time in a while. Good, now generously listed at 6 feet for the Winthrop Eagles, sat in a padded chair in a quiet Winthrop Coliseum.
The Eagles had just come off a stretch of five games in 10 days, and six of their past seven on the road. They lost two Big South games in that stretch — an irregularity for the Rock Hill team that has won two conference championships and earned two NCAA tournament bids in two years — and they could’ve easily lost another, to USC Upstate, had it not been for a pair of 3s and an assist from Good in the game’s final 32 seconds to force overtime and ultimately win.
Yes, in other words, Good still had it.
What makes Good great can be found in the video of shots like these — those that show off crossovers, vertical leaps and muted celebrations. His play adequately represents itself. But there’s an extra element that makes Good valuable for Winthrop: He is a big reason why the Eagles (15-8, 8-2 Big South) are among the luckiest college basketball teams in the country.
Calling Winthrop “lucky” is not conjecture. It’s mathematically backed. As of Feb. 2, according to advanced analytics website KenPom.com, Winthrop boasted the country’s ninth-highest “luck quotient” — a data point formulated by comparing the team’s actual record and its “expected” record using a whole bunch of variables, including final-score margin. Fifteenth-ranked Providence had the nation’s highest luck quotient; Charlotte was No. 8.
Of the Eagles’ 15 wins, seven have been by five points or less and three have come in overtime. The only three times they’ve defeated a Division I team by more than seven points have been in their most recent games played against NC A&T and Hampton and then also in their late-November game at Washington — which also marked the Eagles’ first win over a Pac-12 opponent in program history.
Winthrop isn’t a second-half team. It’s a last-minute team.
And its protagonist is Good.
“Down the stretch,” head coach Mark Prosser told The Herald with a smile, “we feel pretty comfortable with the ball in his hands.”
Which makes sense. Because Good knows a thing or two about comebacks.
Becoming Pat Good
There’s another video on his iPhone, taken in April 2019, that Good regularly watches. This one doesn’t capture Good hitting a game-winning three or a pair of game-tying free throws at the buzzer.
It’s the documentation of his first real setback — of him shooting a basketball from a chair.
Through most of his life, Good hadn’t needed to overcome much. He grew up in Johnson City, Tennessee, a town of approximately 66,000 people in the state’s northeastern edge. He was raised by a basketball-loving family: His father, John, was his basketball coach at David Crockett High School. His older brother, CJ, was an All-American at King College. His older sister, Johneshia, played ball at ETSU before transferring to Milligan University. His mother, Tracy, loved sports too, and she knew sports could be used as a way to teach her children about responsibility and life.
Pat wasn’t exceptionally tall, but he was tenacious and gritty and had a drive only a certain sliver of players have — the kind shared among shorter guards who feel compelled to prove that they can play bigger than they are every time they step on a court. Good considers his size a positive.
Good signed to play basketball at Appalachian State and contributed there in 2016-17. He then transferred to East Tennessee State University, his hometown team in Johnson City, in 2017-18 for a redshirt season before getting ready to play in 2018-19.
Then, in the summer of 2019 during a workout at ETSU, coming off a ball screen on the left side, Good’s future was flung into uncertainty.
“I remember slipping and my right leg came out from under me, and I did an overextended lunge,” Good said. “I didn’t think anything of it at the time, just thought it was one of those things. But then the next morning, I remember it was difficult to get my socks on, difficult to get into the shower, difficult to get into the car. It was a little alarming, but again, I didn’t know the full extent of it.”
About a week later, he said, he learned that he’d torn the labrum in his right hip.
Learning of his injury was an “emotional experience,” Good said. But he decided to play through it because he couldn’t stand the thought of redshirting two years in a row.
Playing through pain, Good averaged 10.4 points in 27.4 minutes a game. He notched a school single-game record 11 3-pointers that season, too. (That happened at Western Carolina, a team coached at the time by current Winthrop coach Mark Prosser.)
That spring, before the 2019-20 season, Good’s hip required surgery. For most of the months that followed, he was either on crutches or dormant. He still regularly watches that video on his iPhone of him shooting from a chair, one taken 16 days after his surgery in April 2019.
In between each shot, he looks at the faraway rim as if he’s vowing to himself that he’ll fly the moment he can stand.
Leaving his ETSU home
Life continued to get complicated for Good months afterward. In May, he learned he was going to be a father — and at 22 years old, he wasn’t sure what that would entail. The game of basketball changed for him, he said. Fatherhood became his priority.
Good struggled during the 2019-20 season. He averaged 7.5 points a game and shot a career-low 36.9% from the field. But he emerged again, this time with a heroism that’s been well-documented: On the most defining stretch of play in his career up until that point, in the final regular season game of the 2019-20 season, Good scored 24 of his team’s final 30 points — including the game-winning 3 with 7.5 seconds left — to deliver ETSU a regular season Southern Conference Championship (again over Prosser’s Western Carolina Catamounts). A few weeks later, Good and the ETSU Bucs earned an NCAA tournament bid.
All this happened within the first month of his daughter, Braelyn, being born.
“He’s twice the father that he is the big-shot maker,” his father, John, told The Herald with a laugh. “If you knew him, you wouldn’t expect anything less out of him.”
Like the others, though, Good’s high didn’t last long. The world stopped. A pandemic emerged. The 2020 NCAA tournament was canceled, foiling the ending Good and his teammates earned. The hard work it took to prevail despite having to come back from surgery, despite fighting off his early-season shooting slumps, despite adjusting to life as a 22-year-old father — all of it didn’t get its due closure.
The next few months were a whirlwind. Good tested positive for COVID-19 and was forced to quarantine away from his daughter for multiple weeks. The entire team, any time someone contracted the virus, had to quarantine, too — which meant more time away from Braelyn and the rest of his family.
This, plus a perfect storm of events — including Steve Forbes, ETSU’s head coach, leaving Johnson City for Wake Forest — made Good consider if remaining a player was worth it. And at the time, it wasn’t.
Good announced he was done with his college basketball career in October 2020.
He didn’t play at all in the 2020-21 season. It was among the hardest decisions of his life, he said.
Choosing Winthrop
Everything leading up to the spring of 2021 had changed Good: the injury in the offseason before, his early entry into fatherhood, leaving a sport he’d played since he could walk.
And things changed after that year off, too.
“Even when I wasn’t playing, I was still around it every day, still watching it,” Good said. “I just couldn’t get away from it completely, which I don’t think I’ll ever be able to, really. Just because I know how much the game has given me. It’s only right that I give it back.”
Prosser and his coaches remembered Good appearing in the transfer portal in April 2021, shortly after Prosser accepted the job at Winthrop. So they reached out. Good told them he wasn’t seeking to be a centerpiece and didn’t necessarily need the spotlight. He just wanted to win, he said.
Good announced his commitment to Winthrop in July.
He’s now the oldest player on one of the oldest teams in the country — one that has no freshmen on its roster and has four upperclassmen transfers.
“I think for him to sacrifice the things that he’s talked about, for him to come back and play, it was going to have to be a special situation,” Prosser said of Good’s transfer. “And we’re fortunate to be a part of his journey. I genuinely feel that way. We hope that he’s enjoying it. And watching him play, it feels like he is.”
This season, he’s been as advertised, averaging 27.1 minutes a game (tied for second-most on the team) and 11.3 points a game (second-most). He’s scored more than 30 points twice, once against Presbyterian College and once against the Pac-12’s Washington State — where he drained 11 3-pointers. He missed the last two games due to a minor injury, per Prosser, and expects to be available to contribute again soon.
And he’s still hitting big shots.
The Jan. 22 game at home against Gardner-Webb? Good hit the two free throws that put the game out of reach in the final 30 seconds to deliver a 64-62 win at home.
The Nov. 13 game against Mercer? When Winthrop was down nine with 51 seconds left? Good hit the last 3 to send it into overtime, which paved the way for a Winthrop win.
“I enjoy being in the gym by myself more than hitting those shots,” Good said on that previously mentioned Monday. He gets up shots three to four times a day, he said, at times dragging managers from their slumbers early in the morning to rebound for him.
He loves the quiet, empty gym. He always has, he says.
It’s the first place where he learned that tough moments pass and make people stronger.
It’s the first place he learned, and has since affirmed, that there is no circumstance from which he can’t come back.
This story was originally published February 6, 2022 at 7:00 AM.
.jpeg)