Band of Brothers Playing at Bishop Noll

HAMMOND -- When Jeremiah Patton was 6 years old, he fumbled a football during a youth game. No one gave him a slushy at the postgame concession stand.
He came from a family with higher standards.
His uncle, Bobbie Bell, put a football in his arms and made him carry it everywhere for a week.
“Maybe more,” Patton said with a laugh. “I had to hold onto the ball even when I was taking a shower.”
Obviously, it worked.
Patton, a junior running back at Bishop Noll, has rushed 88 times for 862 yards and 12 touchdowns this season. He also plays linebacker, where he has recorded 45 tackles, six tackles for loss and two sacks for a Warriors team that is climbing out of the depths this fall.
Bishop Noll (4-2, 2-0 Greater South Shore Conference) travels to River Forest on Friday.
The program has not had a winning season since 2013, when the Warriors finished 5-5. Noll will host Boone Grove in Week 9, with the winner earning the GSSC North championship. The Warriors have not won a conference title since 1998.
So how did this happen?
Enter second-year coach Rick Good, the Lazarus of Region football coaches.
The former Mt. Carmel player and coach has resurrected programs at Calumet and, to some degree, Lake Central. But the grind of coaching eventually caught up with him, and he stepped away from the profession in 2024.
“I was selling roofing tiles,” Good said. “For a year. Then I got a phone call.”
Bishop Noll athletic director Cindy Wilson had worked with Good at Calumet. She called him and simply said, “Think about it.”
He did. Eventually, he accepted a job few others wanted.
Noll had won just eight games over the previous 10 seasons.
As the program has begun to turn around — thanks in part to Jeremiah and his older brother, Jeff — Good has seen the roster grow. At the beginning of the rebuilding process, just 11 of the 43 players on the roster had played football before arriving at Noll.
“At the start, I realized we didn’t have enough football-playing kids,” Good said. “We had a callout meeting a year and a half ago, and we had 12 kids show up.”
So Good and his coaching staff started going to practices for every sport at the school. They talked to athletes, invited them to football-related activities and encouraged them to give the sport a try.
One by one, other athletes began trickling into football workouts.
One of them was Jeff Patton.
“When we were little, we did Oklahoma drills in the backyard,” Jeff said of his workouts with Jeremiah. “We were trying to kill each other. But I drifted away from football when I got to Noll. Basketball has been my main thing here.
“This is my first year back playing football. Coach Good showed me how fun playing is.”
Jeff has made an immediate impact, recording 45 tackles, eight tackles for loss and four sacks.
The Warriors will play nonconference games against River Forest and West Side before Boone Grove comes to Hammond with a trophy awaiting the winner.
“Once I started coming to practice, I knew we had a real team and not a fairytale,” Jeff said.
Jeremiah knew Noll had struggled on the football field but chose the school because of its academics. Now, he is seeing the pieces come together on the field, too.
“I had faith that we could turn this around,” Jeremiah said. “We’re big on overcoming adversity. When I got here, nobody thought we could win anything. But that’s starting to change.
“We will play for a conference championship in a couple weeks. We can have a winning season. That is all something we all care about.”
The school is growing, with 780 students, although many of them are not football players — at least not yet.
Good is running football camps at local CYO venues, and while the team's success is happening now, he remains focused on growing the numbers on his roster.
“Our goal in the two seasons I’ve been here has been to win more than we lose and to play for a championship,” Good said. “And we have a chance to do that now with leaders like Jeremiah and Jeff.”
Good also credited seniors Sammie Rosas and Jeremiah Alford for providing strong leadership as the Warriors continue their turnaround.

---