The first thing to understand about Patrick Tapé is that the accent on his last name marks him. The Tapé family traces its roots to Côte d'Ivoire — the West African nation where basketball is the national passion second only to football, where the Elephants have played in five FIBA Basketball World Cups including the 2023 tournament in Manila and Jakarta, and where last names like Tapé, Diabaté, and Kouadio carry the resonance of an entire diaspora.
Patrick was born June 8, 1998 in Charlotte, North Carolina, raised in the Charlotte suburb of Matthews. He grew up American — Charlotte schools, Charlotte AAU teams, Charlotte friends — but the Tapé surname carried something else. By his mid-twenties, he would be wearing the Côte d'Ivoire jersey and winning international caps at FIBA tournaments. That arc was decades in the making.
For high school, he attended Queens Grant High School, a small charter school in Mint Hill, North Carolina. He was a 1,000-point scorer, averaged 15 points and 13 rebounds and 4 blocks as a junior, and led Queens Grant to the Uwharrie Conference championship in 2016. He was named first-team All-Conference twice and was named All-First Team by the South Charlotte Weekly News. He played for Pro Skills Basketball on the AAU showcase circuit, averaging 13 points, 12 rebounds, and 4 blocks per contest. He was 6-foot-10 and growing into his frame.
The college recruitment was modest. Tapé chose Columbia University in New York City — the Ivy League program in Morningside Heights, the basketball roster of which is a study in academically gifted late bloomers. He arrived in fall 2016 as part of head coach Jim Engles's first recruiting class. He was, in every sense of the word, an Ivy Leaguer who happened to be 6'10".
The Columbia tenure was a gradual ascent. As a freshman in 2016-17, he played in 17 games and averaged 3.6 points and 3.6 rebounds. As a sophomore in 2017-18, he started 23 of 25 games, averaging 4.4 points and 5.1 rebounds with 1.2 blocks per game. Then came the breakout. As a junior in 2018-19, Tapé started all 27 games for the Lions and averaged 11.3 points, 5.9 rebounds, 1.4 assists, 1.0 steals, and 1.3 blocks per game while shooting 66.5 percent from the field — the kind of efficiency that turns scouts' heads. He was named All-Ivy League Honorable Mention. His career-high efficiency game came against Harvard on February 8, 2019: 22 points and 12 rebounds.
Then, in summer 2019, he tore a ligament in his big toe. The injury would have cost him part of his senior season, and the Ivy League — uniquely among Division I conferences — does not allow medical redshirts or the use of remaining NCAA eligibility after graduation. So Tapé made an unusual call: he sat out the entire 2019-20 season at Columbia to preserve his final year of eligibility. He graduated from Columbia in spring 2020 with a degree in Urban Studies and entered the graduate transfer portal as a 6'10" big man with a 60%+ career field-goal percentage. He left Columbia as the program's all-time leader in field-goal percentage.