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Dan Dougherty is the winningest hoops coach in city-leagues history—and he’s
not done yet.
(page 1 of 2)
Dan Dougherty is sitting in the lobby of the Episcopal Academy’s main building in Merion, taking in the last-minute chaos of the school’s relocation to its freshly built campus in Newtown Square.
“There will be no peace once the kids see him,” says EA secretary Sharon Passarella of Dougherty, a school legend in the classroom and on the basketball court.
“Do you miss my tenacity on the court?” asks one former student athlete helping with the move.
“No, I just plain missed it,” Dougherty shoots back.
“Come on,” the former student says. “I played that first year, scored two points for my career, then you made me the quickest cut ever the year after.”
The 73-year-old Dougherty nearly cut out, too. Sort of. He retired from the classroom at the end of last school year. “I’ve graduated,” he says.
But he’s continued coaching, and EA talked him into tutoring struggling math students three days a week in a student resources program. “With the move, I thought I could cut it off completely and retire,” says Dougherty, who lives in Roxborough. “But the problem is, I’ve never minded any job I ever had.”
Teaching math and coaching basketball have amounted to parallel careers for Dougherty, both beginning almost 50 years ago at St. Pius X High School in Pottstown. Since arriving at EA in 1977, his basketball squads have won 12 Inter-Academic League titles. In his two stints with the Churchmen (1977-97 and 2001-08), Dougherty’s teams are 525-226 overall. Add in a 74-31 mark in five seasons (1962-66) at Malvern Prep, plus his early Pius X and Penncrest High School years (58-37), and he’s gone an astonishing 657-294 over 38 scholastic seasons. Figure in his collegiate coaching tenures at Villanova University and West Point, and he has well over 700 wins.
All told, Dougherty is the winningest coach in the history of Philadelphia city-leagues basketball. When he surpassed Charles “Obie” O’Brien, the longtime La Salle High School coach who won 541 games over 34 seasons, Dougherty had his granddaughter, Erin O’Brien Dugery, in class. She’s now director of alumni at EA.
At Villanova, Dougherty coached the freshman to a 36-18 mark for three years. Then, in 1971, his players lost by just six points to UCLA in the NCAA championship game. That success led him to Army, where he succeeded Bobby Knight, who left for Indiana University. Dougherty was one of 97 candidates, but the only one offered the job.
In four seasons, Dougherty’s West Point teams went 31-66. He gave legendary Duke coach Mike Krzyzewski his start, hiring him as an assistant for two years at a feeder prep school in Virginia. A West Point alum, Krzyzewski was then tapped for the head job after Dougherty was let go.
Today, Dougherty has outlasted many others in a generation of basketball coaches that emerged from their Philadelphia playing days in the ’50s and ’60s. “It’s such a parochial business,” he says. “Rarely was a coach hired from outside the city, and rarely did one leave. Other cities look at that and wonder how five collegiate city teams could produce so many college and professional coaches.”
A St. Joe’s Prep alum, Dougherty never intended to teach math or coach basketball. After graduating from Saint Joseph’s University, he was working as a financial analyst when his former coach, eventual NBA Hall of Famer Jack Ramsay, asked if he was interested in a job at St. Pius X.
