Pace Academy senior Eric Chatfield Jr. poised to become point guard of future at Georgia Tech

His rise to stardom, and the potential for greater notoriety, should come as no surprise given Chatfield’s lineage and the fortuitous nature of those who have come into his life. Still, Chatfield has put in the work to get to where he is today, and he has no plans of slowing down that work in hopes of becoming the next great Yellow Jacket.

“Just getting the opportunity (to play for Tech) was pretty fulfilling for me just knowing that’s somewhere I’ve seen be a prestigious basketball school,” Chatfield said. “The guys that have come out of there like Mark Price, Chris Bosh, Iman Shumpert, Stephon Marbury, and just seeing their history of basketball, that’s somewhere I want to see myself and be a big name on campus.”

Basketball in the blood

Choosing to start with one Chatfield parent’s story over the other might seem disingenuous to the parent who gets second billing in the telling of this tale. Perhaps it’s best to start with Kenny Smith’s family instead.

Smith, the former North Carolina star and NBA champion, first met Chatfield’s father, Eric Chatfield Sr., when Chatfield Sr. was living with Smith’s brother Vince Smith. Vince Smith introduced Eric Chatfield Sr. to Rene Hines who was working for TNT at the time.

“If it wasn’t for the Smith family there would be no Eric Chatfield Jr,” laughed Kenny Smith.

Chatfield Sr. hails from Queens, New York, and attended LaSalle Academy in Manhattan. He then made his way to Angelina Junior College in Lufkin, Texas, and became a first-team All-America selection in 1999. From 2000-02, Chatfield Sr. averaged 12.5 points over 64 games for New Mexico playing for coach Fran Fraschilla.

After a professional international basketball career that lasted more than a decade, Chatfield Sr., who was inducted into the Angelina College hall of fame in 2015, returned to Atlanta and teamed up with Kenny Smith to coach on AAU ball.

“We’ve been in the gym since I was young,” Chatfield Jr. said of his father. “When he sees that I’m in a slump we have the same routine that I do. Every time I’ve done that routine and been stricter with that routine, it has always worked. He’s always more about my development. But it’s also learning from the things he feels he didn’t do in his basketball career and putting that into my situation is something that he’s been focusing on as well.”

Hines, meanwhile, had built an impressive basketball resume of her own.

She starred at Hammond High School in Columbia, Md, and earned a scholarship to play at Georgia State. She also made headlines by giving birth to Chatfield Jr.’s older brother, Andre Williams-Hines, when she was a high school junior - Hines’ story was chronicled in The Baltimore Sun in 1997.

Hines helped Georgia State reach the program’s first-ever NCAA Tournament berth in 2001.

From Gwinnett to Harvard

As a child, Chatfield Jr. knew of his parents’ basketball successes. He got to experience the basketball success of his older brother first-hand.

Williams-Hines, who would change his name to Andre Chatfield, grew to be a basketball star in his own right, first at Parkview High School and then at Norcross High School.

Andre committed to Harvard in September of 2013 after winning a state championship for NHS earlier that year. As a senior he captained a team that made it to the state semifinals and was an all-metro honorable mention. Andre would go on to play nearly 50 games for Harvard over four seasons before graduating in 2018.

“He’s more like my dad is, being more hands on a little bit, but he’s younger so he knows how things are nowadays,” Chatfield Jr. said of his relationship with Andre. “He’s somebody I can talk to about where my mental state is. Having an older brother that’s been through it more recent, he’s someone I can go to when I need help with a lot of different things. He’s helped me see the positive in a lot of things.”

The end of Andre’s collegiate career somewhat coincided with when Chatfield Jr. truly began to blossom in his own right. He said it was a couple years later, playing in AAU tournaments on the West Coast, that he started to realize he could hold his own with some of the nation’s top talent.

Chatfield Jr. made the decision to give up playing baseball, his other athletic passion, and focus solely on his basketball future.

“Seeing the progress that I’d made in middle school and seeing how I could compete with some of those top players in the country, it was like, ‘OK maybe I really can do this, this is what I wanna do and this is actually for me,’ " Chatfield said.

Pride of Pace

Chatfield Jr. is averaging 18.6 points, 4.2 assists, 2.5 steals and 2.5 rebounds per game this season for Pace Academy, one of the top teams in the state. He was an all-state selection in Class 4A as a junior and the AJC named him the all-metro player of the year after the 2023-24 season.

Yet Chatfield Jr., who turned 18 on Dec. 18, isn’t what many would consider a blue chip recruit. His list of scholarship offers is small. And Tech is the only program from a major conference on that list.

It was in December of 2023 that Tech coach Damon Stoudamire and assistant coach Pershin Williams began to seriously scout Chatfield Jr. In Hawaii of all places, where Tech was playing in the Diamond Head Classic and Pace Academy was playing in the Iolani Prep Basketball Classic, Stoudamire and his staff went to watch Chatfield Jr. play.

“I think that he’s a shifty guard, can shoot it and, big picture, I think that he’s the type of guard that’s only gonna get better and better and better,” Stoudamire said. “That’s what I see from him.”

Tech offered Chatfield Jr. a scholarship in June, he committed in October and signed in November.

The choice wasn’t a difficult one for Chatfield Jr. considering his familiarity with the school down the road from his hometown. Chatfield Jr. has also had a long relationship with Kyle Sturdivant, whom Chatfield Jr. calls his godbrother, a guard who starred for the Jackets from 2020-24 and is now a graduate assistant at Brigham Young.

“He’s always had the game. He was always far beyond his age as far as IQ. I knew he was special,” Sturdivant said. “His dad did a phenomenal job in terms of establishing what it took be a high-level basketball player and the mindset that you have to have. I’m excited to see the player he becomes.”

Focused on the future

Chatfield Jr. said it wasn’t until recently that he began to truly study what it means to be a point guard and how to hone his craft toward the position he plays. Steve Nash, Stephen Curry, Kyrie Irving and Tyrese Haliburton are a few of the NBA players he was quick to rattle off as influential on his game.

“I feel like especially as a point guard, knowing the game of basketball is the most important thing, just knowing how to command your team, and especially with plays, you have to know every single person, every position for a play,” he said. “Film is a big thing for me. I watch a lot of different guys, especially in the NBA, watch a decent amount of college basketball as well. Just making sure I’m picking a part different players and seeing what certain guys do well and how I can incorporate it within my game.”

Chatfield Jr.’s motivation to improve on and off the court comes from his younger brother, Jalen Chatfield, a freshman at Woodward Academy more focused on a football career than a basketball one. Setting a quality example for Jalen to follow is of high importance, Chatfield Jr. said.

As for elevating his basketball prowess, he leans on guiding hands of his parents who have both lived the college and professional basketball experience, playing at a high level in their own respective heydays. Chatfield Jr. has also soaked in the lessons he has learned from coaches like Kenny Smith, Pace Academy’s Sharman White and Chapel Hill’s Mike Artis.

“I knew all along, and I would always say to Eric (Chatfield Sr.) that (Chatfield Jr.) had a high major Division I basketball player IQ. He just has to grow into the body of one,” Kenny Smith said. “But he could always do the things that are necessary. There are certain smaller guards that don’t know how to play small, meaning being a pest on defense, getting into the lane, having a great ballhandling wizardry and then can hit the open shot. There’s no surprise that Damon Stoudamire saw that in him.

“He has the quickness and speed that will keep him elusive, and it’ll be very difficult to trap him, even though he doesn’t have maybe some of the size that some of the other guards he’ll face in the ACC. But you can see the success like (North Carolina guards) Elliot Cadeau and RJ Davis are having, he can have that kind of success for sure.”

Chatfield’s plan is to study business when he enrolls at Tech, maybe turning toward a path in entrepreneurship once his basketball career ends. That, of course, appears to be many years away.

His immediate goals are to win a state title for Pace, then to get Tech back into the upper echelons of college basketball. And as his mother, perhaps prophetically, was quoted as saying in 1997, “I do know that nothing can get in your way if you really want it. Nothing. No one can stop you. If you have enough determination, you can accomplish your goal.”