Raised in Louisiana, Sinclair Pride guard Patrick Green said he has experienced everything New Orleans has to offer: Mardi Gras, great food and Hurricane Katrina.
“I evacuated New Orleans at 2 a.m. with my sister, right before Katrina hit. The traffic was so bad we almost went back, but my mom said we had to get out of there,” Green said. “We’re lucky we did leave because our house got destroyed and we lost everything.”
Green said his family went to his grandparent’s house in Lake Charles, La. to escape Katrina’s wrath, but quickly had to evacuate again when Hurricane Rita struck Lake Charles.
“When Hurricane Rita hit, my whole family evacuated to my uncle’s house in Pensacola, Fla. That evacuation was even harder because we evacuated with 15 people and had 18 family members living in one house,” he said.
Green said he stayed in Florida for two months before returning to New Orleans.
“It was quiet silence. We were the only people in our neighborhood. We stood in the middle of the street looking at our house and you couldn’t hear nothing, not even a bird,” he said. “The year Katrina hit was probably the hardest times.”
Green said he lived in a Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) trailer for a couple of months and then enrolled into a private all boys’ prep school.
“I stayed out of trouble because I never left school. I stayed in the basketball gym all day,” he said. “There is a documentary on VH1 where Mannie Fresh said living in New Orleans is like living in a war zone and it really is. You got to watch everywhere you go, you got to watch who you be with and everything. If you don’t… you may get caught in the wrong situation and you’ll be running for your life. My friend got shot with a .45 (caliber) this summer for no reason.”
Green said the prep school’s high tuition became hard on his mom and forced him to make a tough decision.
“I told my mom maybe I needed to get away and go live up north a year with my father because I couldn’t stand New Orleans anymore,” he said.
So Green moved to Dayton with his father – whom he had never lived with before – and played basketball at Dunbar High School.
“My experience at Dunbar was great, I miss it already,” he said. “We had packed gyms, it was always sold out. They taught me how to have heart. You have to play hard every second you’re on that court and you have to put in the work if you want to be good.”
After graduating from Dunbar, Green set his sights on earning a spot on Sinclair’s basketball team.
“I came to the open gyms over the summer and worked my butt off to see if they would give me a chance,” he said. “I felt blessed when coach (Jeff) Price told me I made the team.”
But, after “getting into it” with his father, Green moved back to New Orleans to be with his mom who recently underwent two surgeries; one was to remove a tumor from her back.
“My mom is going through it all right now,” he said. “But she kept hearing me talk about basketball for Dunbar and making the Sinclair basketball team so she thought it was the best idea for me to come back.”
Green won’t get to play in any games this year after being red-shirted, but he has no problems with that.
“The good thing about red shirting is that it gives me a whole extra year of getting better,” he said. “So I have no excuses for next year.”