Ms. Bennita Young brought her son to the pediatrician. It was a routine visit, just to check that her three-year old baby was doing fine and more than anything else that he was healthy. “Oh My God!”, exclaimed the doctor. He had never seen anything like that. The child had already sculpted muscles, emerging from all sides of his baby body. “I swear: he does not lift weights, does not make push-ups or sit-ups. It’s a matter of nature,” she explained. Patric Young was born big, sculpted, full of muscles: it can happen if you are the son of a tight-end who played college football at Bethune-Cookman and three years as a professional in the USFL, with Tampa Bay and Jacksonville: Robert Young.

And it is in Jacksonville, a football town, where this Florida tale began. Patric Young (with no k at the end) is the son of a football player but football is a tough, violent, dangerous sport. For this reason, Robert and Bennita Young soon decided to divert the child’s  attention to other disciplines. Patric’s first passion was baseball: he tried to play at Paxon High School but when he discovered basketball everything changed. Paxon was an academic-oriented school with modest emphasis on sports. It was exactly what Young’s parents wanted for their son. Patric had responded well, with good grades and praises from the teachers. On the court he had attracted the attention of the best colleges in the area, but Florida had easily won the battle for his recruiting. Parents had season-tickets for the football team, Gainesville is close to Jacksonville (130 km) and Florida had become a powerhouse in basketball under future Hall of Fame Coach Billy Donovan (now with the Oklahoma City Thunder), winning two NCAA titles and sending a lot of players to the NBA (Joakim Noah, Al Horford, Mike Miller, Corey Brewer, Chandler Parsons and later Bradley Beal). Before his senior season however Young felt the need to consistently compete at a higher level, gainst better competition, so he moved to Providence, which was located on the other side of the city but offered what Patric needed. In fact, he got the call for the McDonald’s All-America Game,  and won the dunk contest too (in 2011, he participated to the Under 19 World Championships in Latvia, where the USA team finished fifth in spite of beating the eventual gold medal winners from Lithuania: in that game Young scored 15 points against Jonas Valanciunas, now the Toronto Raptors’ starting center).

With the Florida Gators, Young won 120 games in four years, averaging 11.0 points per game as a senior, grabbed 6.2 rebounds per game, and he also won three SEC titles (Southeastern Conference), one of the best conference if not the best in the country. In 2014 he was named Defensive Player of the Year and the Gators finished the conference play unbeaten, 18-0. Eventually they won the SEC championship by edging Kentucky in the final, 61-60. That year, Florida also made it to the NCAA’s Final Four, losing the semifinal in Dallas against Connecticut who moved on to win the title. Defense, physicality, rim protection, energy are his strengths. Not only that: Young has been named student-athlete of the year in the SEC three times.

Obviously he expected to be selected in the 2014 NBA Draft. He worked out for 13 teams. He was upset when nobody called his name. “In the selection process everything went well, workouts, interviews, combines. I don’t understand why nobody took me,” he said shortly after the draft to the Jacksonville newspaper. However, 12 hours later he was called by the New Orleans Pelicans. Then Detroit and Philadelphia called. He signed for the Pelicans, played with their summer league team and made the opening-night team. But when the contract was about to become guaranteed throughout the year, he was realeased. He has been in the NBA but has never played. Three days later he landed in Europe to play for Galatasaray and make his EuroLeague debut. In the summer of 2015 he was already contacted by Olympia but first he decided to play in the summer leagues with Phoenix and then opted for a 2-year deal with Olympiacos turning down the Los Angeles Clippers offer to go to their veterans’ camp in the fall. During the early part of the season he was playing the best basketball of his life. “Billy Donovan told me that physically I’m stronger than 95 percent of everyone even though I’m an undersized center. What I was able to do is just kill people with my energy, run the floor and seal guys under the basket. I was averaging 2.6 blocks a game in the EuroLeague, which is something that I’ve never been able to do in my career as far as maintaining that. Defensively, in the pick-and-roll situation and post defense, guys weren’t scoring on me so I was able to be an anchor for my team while I was on the court ” said Young to BasketballInsiders. He was voted the EuroLeague’s MVP in the first week of the 2015/16 season, playing against Cedevita Zagreb (he had 16 points, blocked 4 shots, grabbed 6 rebounds).

Two weeks later in Milan, he scored 18 points, shooting 6 for 7 from the field; Against Limoges he had 13 points, 10 rebounds, five blocks and was 5 for 6 from the field. He was averaging 10.8 points, 2.6 blocks, 5.0 rebounds a game, shooting 71.4 percent from the field (20 for 28). The injury occurred in Istanbul, early in the fifth game of the European season, the 10th overall. He underwent a long rehabilitation, that held him out for ten months. He spent the entire last season at Olympiacos to finish the recovery process that was started at Gainesville, moved for six weeks to Orlando and finished in Greece (he played all the 30  EuroLeague games). His workouts are legendary in Florida and also in Greece. “I love working out. The number one thing that I’ve learned growing up is that you can have talent, but if you don’t have a work ethic to back up that talent, it’ll only get you so far. Same with being an athlete coming to basketball; you can be an athlete in basketball and jump really high and do certain things really well or hustle, but it’s only a certain small niche of guys that can do that. At the top level, you need to be able to make some hook shots, be confident with the ball in your hands that you’re not going to turn it over and things like that. It’s important that I can build my confidence outside of just being an athlete so if that’s taken away from me, I can bring something else to the game.”

Note: Patric Young is one of 15 players in history who has played at least 150 NCAA games. He helped his team win 120 of them, one more than Kaleb Tarczewski’s won at Arizona.

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