Columbus North girls basketball coach Pat McKee makes a point during a semistate game against Roncalli at Richmond High School in Richmond, Ind., Saturday, Feb. 20, 2016. The Bull Dogs defeated the Rebels 55-48 to advance to back to back state championship games.
The Republic file photo
Mel Good and Pat McKee took girls basketball to new levels of sustained success during their times at Columbus East and Columbus North.
On Sunday, the former coaches will be recognized for their achievements when they are inducted into the Hoosier Basketball Coaches Association Hall of Excellence.
“They say coaches get too much credit when you win and too much blame when they lose,” McKee said. “This is a case of getting credit for a great program. I hope I helped provide structure and organization and a vision of what we could be.”
For McKee, that vision resulted in a Class 4A state championship in 2015, state runner-up finishes in 2012 and 2016, a Final Four appearance in 2017 and two other sectional titles during his 11-year run with the Bull Dogs that ended in 2021.
“It’s very nice,” McKee said. “I’m humbled. I’m not sure I’m truly deserving. It happened because we were really good, and that’s because of our players and assistant coaches and our parent support. My name might go on a plaque, but it’s not because of me. It’s because of the players.”
Meanwhile, Good led the Olympians to Final Four appearances in 1994 and 1997, the final year of the one-class era. He went 186-106 with five sectional and four regional titles in his 13 seasons as head coach.
Good and McKee will be two of five coaches honored in a ceremony beginning at 12:30 p.m. Sunday at North Daviess High School. The program will be followed by the HBCA East-West girls game at 2:15 p.m. and the boys contest at 4 p.m.
“(Being selected for the Hall of Excellence) was a surprise,” Good said. “I was very grateful that they would even think about me. By the grace of God, I was selected for that.”
Good took over the East girls program in 1990 after serving as a boys assistant for the previous six seasons.
“I’d always go back to the first practice, and I didn’t know how to coach girls basketball,” Good said. “The first practice, we started practicing, and they were 20-some girls that had come out, and they were probably only five still on the floor. They hadn’t run that hard before. I told them I don’t know much about girls basketball, but we’re going to work hard, and we’re going to have success. We went to two Final Fours and four semistates, so that was good.”
Since stepping down as head coach of the Olympians, Good has spent time as girls basketball coach at Columbus Christian before returning to East as an assistant girls coach from 2009-13. He coached the men’s club team at IUPUC in 2013-14, a sixth-grade girls team at Richards Elementary in 2014-15 and was a boys assistant at Trinity Lutheran from 2018-20.
But Good, who won the Jack Cramer Ideals of Athletic Competition Award in 1994 and has run the 2Good Basketball Camp with one of his sons for the past 15 years, is best known for his tenure as the East girls head coach.
“When I see the girls and how we’ll they’ve done in life, it makes you feel good,” Good said. “It all starts with parents. I was fortunate enough to have a lot of good parents, and it made it easy on me. It was such a joy to teach the girls how to dribble and things like that and just let the Lord lead them.”
Since retiring after 41 years working for Cummins, Good, now 73, has spent the past decade at East, first as a special education teacher and now working with kids in the In-School Suspension program.
“I don’t think I could just sit at home,” Good said. “I like to stay busy. I enjoy being at East and working with the people over there. They’re really good people.”
McKee’s path to coaching was much different. He worked as a sports writer and assistant sports editor at The Indianapolis Star from 1982-2008 and covered boys and girls high school and women’s college basketball, along with the 1987 Pan American Games.
During that time, McKee also was a volunteer assistant coach at Butler University, then coached travel team basketball for 15 years. His teams won seven Indiana AAU state titles, one Hoosier State Games, one international event in Austria and three national tournaments. He was Indiana AAU girls basketball chairman from 1989-2002 and served vice president, president and secretary for the Indiana AAU all-sports program.
For his service as a writer, McKee received a Special Recognition Award from the National Federation of High School Associations in 2002, an IHSAA Distinguished Media Service Award in 2002 and an Indiana Basketball Coaches Association Virgil Sweet Award in 2004. He was inducted into the Indiana Basketball Hall of Fame in 2008 and the Indiana Sportswriters and Sportscasters Hall of Fame in 2009.
At North, McKee went 230-59 in his 11 seasons. He was a HBCA Coach of the Year, Indiana Coaches of Girls Sports Association 4A Coach of the Year, NFHS/Indiana Indiana Girls Coach of the Year and a seven-time Conference Indiana Coach of the Year. He coached the Indiana Junior All-Stars in 2012 and the 2018 Indiana All-Stars. McKee, who now lives in Punta Gorda, Florida, still serves at director of special projects for the IBCA.
“If it’s about my time as coach in Columbus, I’d say it’s really more of a program award,” McKee said. “I tried to be organized and do things the right way. But I’m smart enough to know if we’d have had average players, we’d have had average results. We had excellent players, and we had excellent results. Winning is a byproduct of many things, talent being really important, but some intangible things, too.”
McKee credited his players and assistant coaches, as well as the estimated 50-some coaches who helped him in the Columbus Comets program that he started after arriving in Columbus in 2010.
“This recognition from the HBCA is humbling. I’m appreciative, but I truly view it as a program award. I had to make some of the big decisions, but when it came down to the Xs and Os, Ron (Patberg) and Brett (White) and RaNae (Isaak), especially, and others, they all contributed to the success of the program. It’s so many people that impact the success of a total program. I’m representing all the players, all the coaches, all the parents who contributed to making the program what it was. We had a wonderful community behind us wanting us to succeed.”
