Most of all, they exemplify what it means to be a Mountaineer.
Life after college for Geno Smith, Petal Palmer, and John Flowers has taken some winding country roads. Smith is one of only 32 men in the country to be a starting NFL quarterback. Palmer, whose life took an unexpected turn, is a cancer patient advocate who educates her followers through social media. Flowers is using his time and talents through coaching an alumni basketball team to raise money for kids to play the sports they love. All successful in spite of life’s challenges, all focused on a future they didn’t expect, all building on the foundations laid at West Virginia University.
‘The best times of my life’
John Flowers (BS, ‘11) lives in Morgantown while raising his family and working as a financial adviser. If you ask him, he’s a West Virginian, adopted by the Mountain State. While many may know Flowers from his time at WVU in a Mountaineers basketball uniform 13 years ago, he’s also been a key cog in helping many former WVU stars from different eras take the court together as “Best Virginia,” part of The Basketball Tournament which has taken place every summer for nearly a decade.
“That’s just part of the fun of it all,” Flowers said. “The saying is, ‘Once a Mountaineer, always a Mountaineer.’ It’s a brotherhood, a fraternity. No matter where we go, we help each other out.”
As a Waldorf, Md., native, Flowers signed to play basketball for WVU under John Beilein, but stayed committed to the Mountaineers even after Beilein left, reaching four NCAA tournaments from 2008-11, including a Final Four in 2010. The 6-foot-7 small forward averaged 5.2 points per game during his time as a Mountaineer, but it was his defensive prowess that made him a strong asset, tied for fifth all-time in program history with 157 blocks.
Flowers followed up his college career with a pro career overseas in Germany and France but returned to West Virginia when it was time to hang up the sneakers. “Some of the best times of my life were playing at West Virginia,” Flowers said. “I learned a lot about perseverance and hard work – you get out what you put in. I met my wife while I was here, I still talk to all my teammates."
“ Coming to WVU shaped who I am today. ”
— John Flowers
“I just love Morgantown and West Virginia, including the people here. They’re just amazing, hard-working people, and I connect with that.”
Flowers helped organize alumni games not long after his college career was over – a chance for former players to get together and raise money for charity; however, with the TBT coming to fruition, he saw it as an opportunity to showcase former Mountaineers on the hardwood.
The TBT is a single-elimination tournament, which has expanded to 64 teams since its inception in 2014. Teams are typically comprised of alumni from a certain school, so Best Virginia has largely been filled with WVU alums over the course of the last five years since the first squad in 2019. Players from the Final Four team, such as Flowers and Kevin Jones, have played with the likes of Kedrian Johnson and Erik Stevenson, who starred for the Mountaineers more than 10 years since the Final Four group.
Outside of the TBT, Flowers’ goal was to help youth sports and young athletes in West Virginia, so he helped create the Best Virginia Youngstars. “We’re into the youth developmental programs and want to create change there,” Flowers said. “We want to develop talent out of West Virginia. It’s not anyone’s fault, but we are behind with our talent here, so we want to help.” He hopes to expand 19 boys’ and girls’ teams into other sports, such as football, baseball, and soccer for youth camps. “It’s just our way of giving back.”
Time to persevere
Petal Palmer (BS, ’24) was expecting to start the second half of her cross-country career at WVU during the late summer of 2022, but everything changed when she started to feel ill that August and was diagnosed with acute lymphoblastic leukemia. Rather than spending time on the course, she spent a month in the hospital and had chemotherapy treatments for the months that followed.
Prior to her illness, Palmer helped the Mountaineers compete in the 2020 Big 12 championships and 2021 NCAA championships and had a career best time of 19:25.4 and 22:38.2 in the women’s 5k and 6k, respectively. It was a slow adjustment her freshman season, as the Ontario, Canada, native came to WVU at the height of the pandemic in 2020. But once restrictions were loosened during her sophomore year, Palmer began to enjoy life on campus.
But leading up to her junior season, she started to feel symptoms of leukemia, which forced her to the sidelines. Although now in the “maintenance” phase, Palmer is still in the long process of a two-and-a-half-year treatment plan, which includes various types of chemotherapy, steroids, spinal taps, periodic transfusions, and bone marrow biopsies. Chemo has taken its toll on Palmer physically. “The past two years, I found that every time I tried getting back into a decent routine, something would happen that would set me back again,” she said. “Even running at slower paces has been a lot harder on my body. Whenever I go for a short 10-minute run at what used to feel like an easy pace, my heart rate gets relatively high and my stomach begins to hurt, as opposed to being able to easily run for 90 minutes at a decent pace like before.”
While cancer prematurely ended Palmer’s cross-country career, she persevered and finished her academic career with a 4.0 GPA, graduating with a BS in exercise physiology last spring with plans to attend medical school. Her success in the classroom was recognized by the 2024 Wilma Rudolph Student-Athlete Achievement Award by the National Association of Academic and Student-Athlete Development Professionals, which honors student-athletes who have “overcome great personal, academic and/or emotional odds to achieve academic success while participating in intercollegiate athletics.”
While she was bedridden in the fall of 2022, she watched a lot of storytelling and essay-style videos. The medium piqued her interest, and combined with what she was learning about the patient experience, she gained a new passion, starting her own YouTube channel based on patient advocacy. Since July 2023, the channel (@PetalPalmer) has gained more than 150,000 subscribers and is continuing to grow. In two years, she turned her unfortunate situation into one that can help others, posting deep-dive videos on various medical fields involving malpractice, scams, crimes, or mysteries.
Often people who have needed help pay that forward to help others, and Palmer said she had lots of support from her roommates, teammates, and Coach Sean Cleary.
“ Without the support from my friends, coaches, and professors at WVU it would have been very hard getting through the past two years. I don’t like to ask for help, but even without family here, whenever help was needed I knew there would always be somebody I could rely on.” ”
— Petal Palmer
‘It was a great time for me’
“They wrote me off. I ain’t write back, though.” Geno Smith’s (BS, ’13) viral quote following a win as the Seattle Seahawks’ starting quarterback in 2022 encapsulates what the former Mountaineer has been through during his professional career. Smith, who starred at WVU from 2009-12, has had his fair share of setbacks during his NFL career as he is set to enter his 12th year in the league—from sitting in the draft room until the second round of the 2013 NFL draft, to losing his starting job with the New York Jets, to becoming a backup for four different teams over the next six seasons before finally getting another shot in his 10th year.
The Seahawks named Smith the starter before the 2022 season, and he exceeded all expectations, throwing for 4,282 yards and 30 touchdowns, on his way to winning the AP Comeback Player of the Year Award. The only person who believed he met expectations was Smith. “It’s been like a storybook but also like a blur,” he said. “There’s been a lot of learning experiences. I wouldn’t say ups and downs, a lot of it has been just ups. I’ve been excited to face the challenges I’ve come across, and those things have helped me become a better man and a better quarterback.”
Before his NFL career, Smith shattered nearly every significant passing mark during his four years with the Mountaineers. He is first in career passing yards (11,662), touchdowns (98), and completions (988). “My high school coach, Damon Cogdell, went to West Virginia, so I had always heard good things about WVU,” Smith said. “My teammates and I came up for a game against Cincinnati in 2008 when Pat White was the starting quarterback. WVU was one of the only schools willing to take all of us, so when my teammates committed, I committed.”
After serving as a backup his true freshman season, Smith started all 13 games as a sophomore, showing flashes of his potential all season; however, in his junior season under new head coach Dana Holgorsen, Smith and the Mountaineers offense took off. They went on to win the Orange Bowl, scoring a bowl-record 70 points against Clemson. As a senior, Heisman aspirations faded as the season wore on and the team finished 7-6 during WVU’s first campaign in the Big 12. But Smith still had a huge season, throwing for a school-record 42 touchdowns, including 25 to Stedman Bailey.
Smith wears different colors than gold and blue today, but he is still an ambassador for WVU when he speaks of his alma mater on the national stage. “All of those experiences, all of those games … I remember them like they were yesterday,” Smith said. “I went from a young kid to a grown man at West Virginia in just four short years,” he said. “It was a great time for me.”
Smith is proof that Mountaineers are not to be underestimated; his confidence in his ability was born at WVU, not only as an individual, but as part of something much, much bigger. Smith still keeps in touch with former teammates, friends he’s made for life, drawing on that eternal Mountaineer connection.
“We talk about more than just football and things that are bigger than football. Although our lives have gone in different directions, that's something that's really special to me.”
