skip navigation

Diaz, Dobbins Tech boys echoing success of years past

01/20/2023, 1:15am EST
By Josh Verlin

Josh Verlin (@jmverlin)

When Kareem Diaz isn’t cooking, he’s cooking.

The senior at Murrell Dobbins Career and Technical Education High School is on the culinary track during the day, mixing in classes in history, science and English with those in knife skills, cooking methods and entrepreneurship. He’s gotten to cook for the school superintendent, for the Dobbins community, for family, for anybody who’s around.

“Alfredo, or salmon, or baked chicken, a lot of stuff,” he said. “I like to bake, also.”


Kareem Diaz (above) and Dobbins are flying high this season. (Photo: Josh Verlin/CoBL)

Then Diaz steps on the basketball court, and he’s serving up entirely different dishes: buckets, boards, and dimes. 

The 6-foot-5 wing forward is a major reason that the Mustangs are one of the hottest teams in the city, now 15-1 on the season and 8-0 in the Public League ‘C’ Division after a 60-49 win at Roxborough on Thursday afternoon.

It’s a season that has some at the school at 22nd and Lehigh dreaming about the old days, when Dobbins was regularly one of the tops in the Pub. 

“Just before we got on the bus today,” head coach Derrick Stanton said, “I (told the team) there was a teacher who had been there during the glory days, they said ‘you really need to celebrate this team, because we haven’t had this in a long time.’’

The vocational school, built in the mid-1930s at its current location in North Philly, was at one point one of the top hoops programs not just in the city, but the entire country. The duo of Hank Gathers and Bo Kimble, who led the Mustangs to the Public League title in 1985, later starred at Loyola-Marymount before Gathers’ tragic passing in 1990; Kimble was the eighth overall pick in the 1990 NBA Draft. Doug Overton and Horace Owens, two more future NBA ballplayers, also played at Dobbins.

They’re not even the school’s most famous alumni: Hall of Famer Dawn Staley donned a Dobbins uniform for a career that former Daily News scribe Ted Silary wrote established her as the “best female player in Philadelphia history,” her teams going 66-1, before embarking on her legendary playing and coaching career. 

But ever since the rise of the charter schools, Dobbins’ hoops pull has diminished; the school’s last Division I recruit, Jerrell Wright (La Salle), graduated in 2011. Dobbins hasn’t played in a city championship game since 2010, when a Tony Chennault-led Neumann-Goretti squad handed the Mustangs a 31-point defeat; that same year was the last time they made a real run in the Public League tournament, losing to Bartram in semifinals.

Nevertheless, it’s that history that’s why Diaz ended up at the school in the first place.

“I used to go to AB [Anni Blakistone] Day in West Oak Lane, literally across the street from MLK,” he said. “(My principal) was saying you should go to Dobbins, there were NBA players that went there and stuff, she was pumping it up, she was saying I should go there, it would be a good choice and I would fit in there. And when I went there, I loved it, even though (the basketball team) wasn’t very great.”


Diaz (above) is in the culinary track at Dobbins, which offers trade classes alongside traditional high school courses. (Photo: Josh Verlin/CoBL)

Last year, Dobbins went 5-10, playing with a shorthanded group missing what would have been some key rotation members due to COVID restrictions. They got a sense that something was different from the very first game of the offseason, a spring league win over Palumbo in a game at Vaux High School. Over the following months, they scored wins over the likes of Overbrook and West Philadelphia, among many others, showing hints of what was to come.

Aside from a loss to Souderton on Dec. 27, Dobbins has gone unscathed, beating a schedule mostly populated with Public League teams from different levels, though they’ve also topped Owen J. Roberts and Germantown Friends, with only one home game between Dec. 28 and Jan. 20. 

This year’s group is the most successful in quite some time, and that isn’t lost on the Mustangs. (It helps that Kimble, now the head coach at Overbrook, was an assistant coach last year.)

“They know his story really well, they know Hank Gathers’ story really well,” Stanton said. “(Staley’s) image is all around the school.”

It’s nothing that Stanton, who’s in his second year coaching the Mustangs, needed to be educated about. A 1986 graduate of Northeast High, playing in the Public League during Dobbins’ heyday, he’s taken his own unique path to put him in the perfect position to help the Mustangs reach their potential. 

Stanton enrolled in the army out of high school, but left after four years to get his undergraduate degree at Temple, so he could re-enlist as an officer. He rose to the rank of Major before retiring in 2012, having served as a physical education instructor at West Point, teaching courses in fitness and boxing. 

Stanton’s career kept him in New York, where he served as the Parks and Recreation Director at the City of Newburgh, N.Y., and also got into hoops, coaching JV teams at Newburgh Free Academy and Burke Academy. His career then finally brought him back to Philadelphia, hired at Dobbins just ahead of the pandemic as a Health & Physical Education teacher, though he was promoted to Dean of Students last fall.


Stanton (above) is in his second year as Dobbins' varsity coach. (Photo: Josh Verlin/CoBL)

“Being around those cadets, I can appreciate [...] what the United States is looking at in the young people,” he said. “These guys, they’re young, but if they start going off track or something, I have a point of reference as to what you need to be like…not that they have to be a soldier, but somebody with good values, hard-working, good time management, all the things that make a fine young person.”

The Mustangs have clearly responded to Stanton’s coaching. They play hard from whistle to whistle, but not selfishly, moving the ball from side to side against the Roxborough zone, or attacking and dishing against man, finishing with 13 assists in Thursday’s win. They crash the offensive glass — hard, demonstrated by their 17 offensive rebounds against Roxborough, a count which might be a couple short, a few plays featuring four or five shots in a span of seconds, bodies flying around the rim.

And they defend. Oh, they defend. 

The Mustangs’ full-court press was relentless all game long, almost everybody Stanton put on the court coming away with multiple steals. Senior guard Faheem Robinson was the primary culprit, coming up with six swipes of his own, many just from guarding his man 1-on-1, but he was just part of a machine that never stopped pushing, making it increasingly difficult for Roxborough to get into its sets.

“It gets us going, especially if we have a cold-shooting day like we did today,” Stanton said on a day when his team only hit one 3-pointer, though it didn’t lack for attempts. “It leads to some easy baskets, and transition is our thing. And then we can get right back into pressing, trying to wear them down a little bit.”

Dobbins forced more than 25 Roxborough turnovers on Thursday; afterwards, Stanton still said he thought the defense “struggled a lot,” though he paused when told of that turnover total.

“I guess I got on ‘em for nothing, then,” he said with a laugh.

Still, it shows the standard to which he’s trying to hold his group, which is led by its top two scorers from a year ago: Diaz, who has interest from D-IIIs Del Val, Arcadia, Alvernia and Albright, is the centerpiece, a versatile talent with high-level athleticism who’s really starting to round out his game. 

He finished the win against Roxborough with 18 points, six rebounds (five offensive) and six assists, throwing home a monster dunk on the fast break; most of his buckets came on left-handed finishes around the rim, either on catch-and-finishes or creating out of the high post. 

“His athleticism is off the charts, so that helps us a lot,” Stanton said. “Over the course of the summer, he just blossomed into a great passer [...] he started getting more confident in his teammates, and even last game against Masterman, he had to lead us in assists because he was able to see the floor so well.”


Faheem Robinson (above) had 8 points, eight rebounds, six steals and two assists against Roxborough. (Photo: Josh Verlin/CoBL)

Also back in the starting lineup is Zachary Campbell, a 6-2 junior shooting guard who had 16 points, five rebounds, four assists and two steals against Roxborough. Joining those two and Robinson in the lineup are senior Gabriel Galloway (4 points, two rebounds) and sophomore Saleem Hudson (7 points, 4 rebounds, two steals); sophomore Sam Thomas, junior Jarrell Little and freshman Haneef Davis (7 points, four rebounds) ate up most of the bench minutes.

Dobbins knows that another Public League championship is the longest of longshots, nationally-ranked Imhotep and its bevy of Division I talent the overwhelming favorite to win the whole league, and several other ‘A’ division squads all have their eyes on a deep run. But depending on the seedings in the Pub playoffs, the Mustangs could get a couple home games in the early rounds and use that as a springboard to at least the semifinals, putting them in position to maybe make it back to the PIAA Class 5A tournament. 

First up comes a home game against fellow unbeaten Olney on Jan. 24, the winner the heavy favorite to win the division title, though they have to take the rest to ensure it. They know they need to keep the pedal to the metal and not to take anything for granted.

“We might not be the best, but our chemistry is there,” Diaz said. “We played with each other every day, we know what we’re doing, what spots to go at, we play as a team. My coach always told me, ‘you know, every team is beatable, and you never know who could sneak up on you.’ 

“I remember during the summer, (we played) a trash team, a team we should have blown out; even though we won, they were hanging out there with us, because they wanted it more than us. We were thinking we’re too cool for them, we were wrong for that. 

“I really believe we’re going to make it to the final four. I don’t talk crap, just let the game play.”

By Quarter
Roxborough: 13  |  11  |  12  |  13  ||  49
Dobbins:       19  |  20  |  16  |   5   ||  60

Scoring
Roxborough: Stefan Phillips 14, Naim Ferguson 11, Justin Vega 8, Sherrod Nelson 6, Keyson Powell 5, Christian Vazquez 3

Dobbins: Kareem Diaz 18, Zachary Campbell 16, Faheem Robinson 8, Saleem Hudson 7, Haneef Davis 7, Gabriel Galloway 4


D-I Coverage:

Small-College News:

Tag(s): Home  Josh Verlin  High School  Boys HS  Public League (B)  Public League C (B)  Dobbins  Roxborough