Track star signs with Trinity University

Shiner St. Paul track and field star Patrick Green officially inked his intention to compete at the college level by signing with Trinity University, a private liberal arts university in San Antonio.

The senior athlete is expected to compete in the 110-meter hurdles, the 400-meter hurdles and the pole vault at the college level.

“Whenever I was talking to Trinity, it would always feel a lot more personable and the size of the school is more of what I want,” Green said of his college choice. “And they have a really highly ranked program.”

Being a Shiner St. Paul athlete generally means competing in multiple sports. Green knows that “track and field is a grind,” but his time on the track is what pulled him to that specific sport, instead of other team-based sports like football.

“There’s things about each sport that I love and just the different ways of competing against people,” he said. “Football was just kind of a grudge match. It’s a different test of endurance than track. There’s different aspects of every sport but I would say track, being the most successful for me was most fun.”

“Success” is putting it lightly. Green has many gold medals, including recently at the 2019 TAPPS 2A South Regional meet wehre he won gold in 110-meter hurdles, silver in the 300-meter hurdles, gold in the 4x400-meter relay with Kellen Opela, Dalton Jahn, Kai Giese and Carson Reese and gold in the pole vault. He’s set to compete, alongside his Cardinals’ teammates, at the TAPPS 2A state meet later this month.

Green cites senior leadership as a motivator for him throughout his high school athletic career.

“Being at St. Paul, it’s really competitive,” he explained. “There’s always somebody there to push you. My sophomore year whenever I started to develop a litte more and become faster, there were seniors there that I always try to beat at practice, even though they were faster than me I would always try to beat. It was a constant thing at motivated me. Going into state, I PR’d at every event that I did and that was awesome, that felt great, so that kind of made me want to be better. That motivated me to be even better the next year and coming this year. It makes me want to be better every time.”

Green also gave credit to coaches and his parents who paid for pole vault lessons, since St. Paul currently doesn’t have a pole vault pit.

In the classroom, Green wants to major in business finance and analytics in technology. The senior track athlete has his eyes set at potentially getting a master’s degree. His goal freshman year is to focus on his classwork and be as organized as possible.

“I got some advice from some college students to get a calendar at the beginning of the year, take your syllabuses from all your teachers and just write down everything and write down whatever events you have so you know what’s going on,” he said. “That’s something I want to do and be a very active person in the Trinity community.”

When asked for advice, Green noted that focus and balance are the keys to success.

“You can’t wait to start doing good. You need to be doing good [now],” Green noted. “As a high schooler you don’t want to slack off freshman year and sophomore year, because that’s what I did, that made it kind of harder for me. Junior year I really picked up the pace and senior year. But I would say to focus, keep focused on your goal, but don’t make it to where you don’t have a social life or anything. Save time for yourself, but you want to focus on your academics.”