Ex-Episcopal coach Dougherty a mentor to many

At Episcopal Academy, Jerome Allen was a high-priority recruit for a number of colleges. Allen's choice ultimately came down to Penn and Massachusetts.

Bruiser Flint, a UMass assistant in 1990, thought he had the inside track. Flint and Allen had both played at Episcopal for Dan Dougherty. Except that was no advantage. Fran Dunphy, then the Penn coach, also had played high school ball for Dougherty, years earlier at Malvern Prep.

So for the last two decades, Flint has ribbed Dougherty about Allen's choosing Penn over UMass.

"Now I know you love Dunph better than me," Flint quips.

"I've known him longer," Dougherty, 76, jibes back.

Fast-forward and look at the Dougherty connections. Amazingly, four Division I head coaches in Pennsylvania - Flint at Drexel, Dunphy at Temple, Allen at Penn, and Pat Chambers at Penn State - were high school point guards for Dougherty. Plus, Lafayette's Fran O'Hanlon was on a Villanova freshman team coached by Dougherty.

The Jack Ramsay coaching tree is legendary. NBA, college, and high school coaches tutored by the Hall of Famer are carrying on today, including on Hawk Hill. But the strongest current branch of the Ramsay tree - more like a trunk of its own - has to be the one that runs through a man who walked on at Hawk Hill out of St. Joseph's Prep and started in the very first Big Five game on Dec. 14, 1955, at the Palestra.

Dougherty guarded Guy Rodgers in early City Series battles, was an assistant coach on Villanova's 1971 Final Four team (while teaching math at Malvern Prep), a head coach at Army (between Bobby Knight and Mike Krzyzewski), and then became a legend around here as a high school mentor, teaching math the whole time, living in the same house in Roxborough for decades.

"He's a special dude," said Flint, who played point guard at St. Joe's. "I think he put a lot of stuff in us that we actually put in our teams."

Dougherty's first job after college had been at St. Pius X in Pottstown. He was part of a wave of Ramsay players who fanned out across the area, preaching attention to detail.

"You were going to concentrate on defense - two-thirds of your practice was on defense," Dougherty said of the Ramsay influence. "You had to be in shape to play defense. Jack Ramsay had us doing a lot of pressing. As a young coach, that was my main thing. If you played good pressing man-to-man defense with a little zone, you created maybe a third of your offense."

And you will not pass the ball off the dribble. Allen heard himself say that to a player in practice recently - "because if it's not there, you can't get it back" - and instantly he knew he had just spoken a Coach Doc-ism.

At Episcopal practices, there were no out-of-bounds lines, no whistles.

"None whatsoever," Allen said. "Out of bounds was maybe if you saw blood or somebody lay there."

"It probably started when I first went to Episcopal 30 years ago," Dougherty said. "When I first made the transition to Episcopal, some thought they were playing hard, but they didn't realize how hard they had to play if they were going to be successful. So you get the ball if it goes under the stands. . . . It changed the whole culture."

Dougherty, who retired in 2010, won 679 high school games and is credited as the winningest coach in city leagues basketball history (Public, Catholic, Inter-Ac), winning 621 games at Malvern (1962-66) and Episcopal (1977-97, 2001-10). He also spent three seasons at Pius X and one at Penncrest.

"I will tell you this, I don't know where I would be without Dan Dougherty," said Dunphy, relating how in addition to coaching him at Malvern, Dougherty talked La Salle into giving this guard of his a shot. Then Dougherty took Dunphy on as an enlisted assistant at Army.

"He got me into coaching. I didn't come out of that saying I have to be a coach. . . . I was playing every sport I could, Eastern League basketball for a couple of years, working construction, as a bartender, my cousin had a carpeting company. Before Malvern asked me to take the job in '75," Dunphy said.

Chambers, now finished his first year at Penn State after head coaching Boston University and a stint as a Villanova assistant, feels similarly about how Dougherty has influenced his life. He boils it down to one phone call.

Chambers had been helping out at Episcopal for two years while working in his family's printing business. The business was going well, but keeping him busy 60-plus hours a week. "I told him, 'Hey, I don't think I can do it this year.' "

Dougherty told him, "Just show up one day a week." Chambers remembers saying, "Coach, I love you, but I just can't do it. I don't have the time." Dougherty declined to take that for an answer. He repeated, "One day a week."

"I'll never forget that phone call," said Chambers, who had Dougherty in with his coaching staff after a recent game to critique Penn State's defense. "He obviously knew I wouldn't just come one day a week. I wonder - if he had let me quit, I don't know where I'd be today."

When Allen got the Penn job, he called up his old coach, asked him if he had one piece of advice.

"Jerome, be Jerome Allen," Dougherty remembers telling him. "Don't be Fran Dunphy, don't be Dan Dougherty."

Some of the Doc branches are more like intertwining vines. Gene Burroughs, another Episcopal graduate, is an assistant to Chambers at Penn State.

"He played for my Biddy League team in the Sonny Hill League," Flint said.

Flint's father had recommended Allen for Episcopal. Allen and his current assistant Dan Leibovitz, a former head coach at Hartford, became close at Episcopal.

O'Hanlon, whose first college job was under Dunphy at Penn, has ties all over the place and is considered one of the top offensive minds in the game.

Also, Dougherty coached current NBA players Gerald Henderson and Wayne Ellington. Former NBA player and coach Chris Ford played for Dougherty at Villanova.

"He always told me that I would come back [to Episcopal] and take his place," Flint said, remembering how Dougherty saw him as a future coach even in high school. "I said, 'No, no, no. I like making money. I'm not going to be no high school coach.' "

Flint knows the irony in his answer. What kind of legacy could a high school coach have?