Flying High

How college basketball star Patrick Dickert went from sidelining injury to Chinese Basketball Association

The Amherst College gym is almost empty, with ceiling lights humming softly to themselves. Patrick Dickert paces to the free-throw line, trying to practice the long dunk that made him go viral on social media. “Good Morning America” wants him to dunk on national TV, and his home college, Colby College, is arranging a dunk-off between him and one of the bosses of the Boston Celtics. It’s his junior season, the year when he becomes the captain and scouts start paying real attention to college athletes. The table is being set for him to prove what he has. He bounces the ball, takes a deep breath, and goes.

Two hard steps, a right-foot plant and the air tightens as he flies from the wooden floor. But midway, pain shoots through his ankle, with no reason at all, and he falls through the air incorrectly. He lands short of the basket, crashing down on his right foot. The ball rolls to the corner. He tries a careful circle with the joint and feels a heat that quickly climbs his shin. Just one minute ago, he had a perfectly planned future; a minute later, all he had was a right foot that suddenly wouldn't respond.

By night’s end, he has a “deep bone bruise,” resulting from overpractice. Despite the pain, he cannot risk telling everyone who was counting on him that he could not do it.

Pat makes a bargain with pain, “pumping ibuprofen,” he admits. Protect the right foot and teach the left to fly. “I didn’t want to let everyone down,” he’ll say later, so he keeps jumping off the good foot, believing that all of it is about discipline.

Then, one night in Boston, visiting friends, he laces up to play. A plant, a turn, an unnoticeable sound from the left foot, and the world shrinks. He immediately can’t walk. Pat gets the X-ray and learns the phrase that ends his season: Jones fracture. This stingy, low-flow bone on the outside of the foot steals months from many athletes; even Kevin Durant, an NBA athlete with the most advanced resources and technology available to him, missed almost a whole year because of it. Now that both feet are down, the surgeons decide to go into the right ankle and remove a hereditary bone growth while he’s grounded. The timing could not be crueler. The dream stops for him.

COACH: Pat Dickert is seen coaching Chinese basketball player Yi Jianlian's select high school winter camp. Courtesy photo.

There’s a special kind of silence that follows a canceled future. It sounds like unread texts from producers, like being the team captain but being unable to play in the game – like the echo of your own voice explaining the worst part of the story over and over again. He sits in that silence.

“It all fell apart,” he’ll tell me, flatly, with a pinch of a smile.

But Pat’s story would not end here. Instead, his injury opened unexpected doors: studying and living in Taiwan, coaching in China, and playing in Norway.

The Ball’s in Pat’s Court

A sudden breeze carries salt and the diesel smell of the last ferry. It’s a decade later, the wind off the harbor feels cooler than the basketball court. East Boston at 10 p.m., downtown thrown across the water in broken gold, the skyline’s lights floating on the tide. Pat jogs back from rebounding, gripping onto the shining, damp leather of the ball, chest still lifting and falling. We sit on the cold bench, listening to the backboard creaks.

Up close, he gives off the impression of both coach and player: 30 years old, 6-foot-2, with a lean build through the hips — like someone who can spring without demonstrating it. Brown curls crowd his forehead, swinging gently along with the wooden rosary at his chest. He talks with his whole face, brows flowing, eyes bright and when he laughs, it’s the kind that makes you want to laugh. He is not layered up yet against the cold weather — navy sweater, dark blue jeans — but carries the temperature of the hoop with him, a little heat that warms the night.

Growing up in the Springfield area, where James Naismith invented the sport in 1891 and home to the Basketball Hall of Fame, Pat’s ambition struggled against the small-town mentality. Even in the area so crucial to basketball history, for many young athletes, the future beyond local courts seemed unreachable.

“Surprisingly, not many people made it out of Western Massachusetts,” he says, “but I wanted to.”

Pat’s family, however, encouraged his ambitions. His mother, Diane Savino, a retired art professor at Anna Maria College, developed not only his academic skills but also his creativity, teaching him that mastery requires a deep understanding of every aspect of one’s craft.

“She was the one who taught me that learning never stops,” Pat recalls. “She pulled things out of me that I didn’t even realize I had.”

Savino remembers the left foot injury more vividly than others: the sudden call from her son on a bus, the long drive north to Colby, then sleeping in his dorm bunk so she could drive him back in the morning.

“You could tell it wasn’t just a sprain,” she says. “That set him back, because he had just come off such height.”

At home, as surgeons scheduled procedures and he learned to return to campus on a scooter, she sent him encouraging stories of injured athletes who made it back.

The other part of the answer came from the chair of education at Colby College — Professor Adam Howard. After the setback, Howard sent Pat to Taiwan to participate in a project called Global Elites at an international boys’ school. It gave Pat his first opportunity to see basketball from the other side of the world. For two months, he wrote, he observed and he learned how kids played when basketball was not just a game but a way to achieve. “The research is called Participatory Action Research (PAR),” he says, “Even after I finished my roles with the research, I continued to live this way as a PAR researcher.”

Flying ‘Goofie’

After graduating from Colby, went to mainland China. Chongqing came first, a large Chinese city of cliffs, fog and crazy traffic. He ran skill sessions and built relationships with local coaches, professional players and kids in training. Though knowing he had a talent for learning new languages, people were constantly stunned by how great a Mandarin speaker he was.

People back home call him Pat. But in China, where he has spent years coaching and playing, more people know him as — Gāofēi — the name of Goofy from Disney in Mandarin Chinese, but also literally, “fly high.” He was given this name by his Chinese buddy, Sijie Wei, back in prep school at The Loomis Chaffee School. Pat cherished the name from the day it was.

Going to Norway for the first time in 2019, he almost made the roster for a team, but fractured his knee during the tryout. He later returned to Guangzhou, China, reconnecting with coaches and friends he had made before, this time not as an import but as someone who actually knew the culture. He signed on as a full-time skills trainer and youth-team assistant coach in the Chinese Basketball Association. At the beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic, when many foreigners packed up and left the country, he stayed.

“It was perfect,” he says. “I could still hoop, but the main thing was teaching.”

The love for playing basketball pulled him back and forth like gravity. When borders eased and seasons restarted, he decided to see what Europe had to offer him again. He didn’t have an agent, not even a place to stay, just dedication and a willingness to sleep anywhere. “I couch-surfed across Europe,” Pat says. “I lived in a gym on a mattress for six months.” He rushed between open runs and tryouts, shooting for every possibility.

Within the journeys, Cologne, Germany, became his unofficial base because of one of those couches. A Deutsche Bahn train conductor, Nicole Udaya, saw his Couchsurfing request, noticed he spoke Norwegian — the language that she was eager to learn — and opened up the door for him.

“I’m a very shy person. I don’t have lots of friends,” Udaya says. “But with Pat it was just… natural.”

He stayed longer than either expected and kept coming back ever since.

Udaya is nowhere close to the basketball world. In the evenings, they would practice speaking Norwegian while he talked about basketball and life.

“He can talk a lot about himself,” she says, chuckling. “Not in a bad way — he’s just very passionate about what he is doing. And he listens, too.”

When he needed time alone, he would walk the city, often ending up in a church.

“He said the fact that I wasn’t from the basketball system made him feel relaxed and safe to talk about his visions and concerns.”

After months of drifting, dealing with a fake contract and trying out for teams, Pat landed in Oslo, Norway, with the Centrum Tigers near the end of 2022. Being the first-ever American import player was not easy. A few sessions in, things moved fast — paperwork, signatures, new gears and a new beginning. On his 90th day in Europe, he signed his first playing contract and got permission to remain in the city. Pat became more than just a player, but a part of a city that treated him like one of its own.

To better play in Europe, Pat worked his way through a paperwork odyssey that took him to Sammichele di Bari, Italy, to meet relatives he never knew he had. With an Italian passport in process through his mother’s side of the family, he suddenly counted as a European.

He took his passion for basketball along to Italy. “I finished a preseason in the Italian Second Division, Serie A2, without an agent, just through 3x3 games and people I met,” he says. The club was Blu Basket Bergamo. He practiced and appeared in preseason action, but things did not go as planned. “Even with citizenship, I couldn’t be registered as an Italian player because I didn’t come up in the youth system,” he says. “That rule kept me from signing for the regular season.”

Pat continued north to Trondheim, Norway. He joined the Nidaros Jets and finished it with its winningest regular season in 8 years. The Jets were a project that involved schools, youth and girls’ basketball programs and community work.

What all of it adds up to, he says — China’s schoolyards, Cologne’s living room conversations, Oslo’s first official season — is the idea of a learning community he calls the Global Basketball College.

“I consider myself the first student to graduate from it,” he says. Access, belonging, and purpose are the goals. With two passports and pages full of custom stamps, he keeps finding the right doors and walking through.