Robbie Dosty, a Coolidge High School basketball legend who was drafted into the NBA after his career with Arizona, has passed away from cancer at 62.
“Robbie is without question the greatest basketball player to ever wear a Coolidge uniform,” Coolidge coach Dave Glasgow mentioned Friday.
Glasgow is in his second stint as Coolidge’s coach. He coached there from 1993-04, moved to Sierra Vista to coach at Buena, and then returned to coach the Bears before last season.
“There was never a time that I asked him for something, whether it was to talk to the team or a player, or for money to take the team to play that he didn’t come through,” Glasgow stated about Dosty, who was raised in Randolph, a mostly African-American community outside of Coolidge.
“He actually came in the locker room and talked to the team before the ’98 state championship game against Alchesay.”
He starred on Joe Partain’s first state championship team at Coolidge in 1975-76 and is still the school’s career leading rebounder with 648. He was an all-state selection in 1974-75 and 1975-76.
After his Coolidge career concluded, he attended Colby (Kan.) Junior College for one season before former Arizona assistant Jerry Holmes lured him to Fred Snowden’s program.
A remarkable athlete who could have played college football as a receiver, Dosty reportedly could reach 10 inches above the white square on the backboard.
As a sophomore, he averaged 11 points a game for Snowden, and was headed for potential All-WAC honors in 1978-79 but in the summer before that school year, he was involved in a serious rollover accident on I-10. He swerved to avoid a dog south of Tempe and his car flipped numerous times.
He was lucky to come out of the accident alive but it forced him to redshirt in 1978-79 and he played sparingly in 1979-80.
“I was a shadow of the player I was before,” Dosty said in an interview with the Tucson Citizen in 2004. “When you lose physical ability, you have to rely on knowledge.”
As a senior in 1980-81, he produced a storybook comeback in his career, averaging 13.4 points and 6.6 rebounds a game.
The Golden State Warriors selected him the fourth round and later waived him during training camp.
He went into insurance-adjustment and became a business owner. Since 2000, he operated Robbie D. Dosty & Associates, a financial services and client consulting business based in Tucson.
Dosty ran into well-documented personal issues, but he is remembered for how much he cared about the development of his daughters Sybil and Whitney, two of the best athletes in Tucson high school sports history who attended Salpointe.
Sybil Dosty was the Gatorade Arizona Women’s Basketball Player of the Year as a senior in 2003-04. She averaged 27 points and 11 rebounds per game in her four-year varsity career. She played for Tennessee and Pat Summitt before finishing her career at ASU.
Whitney was a standout volleyball player, one of the best to ever play at Arizona for Dave Rubio. She played professionally overseas and was a member of Team USA.
Funeral arrangements are pending.
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ALLSPORTSTUCSON.com publisher, writer and editor Javier Morales is a former Arizona Press Club award winner. He is a former Arizona Daily Star beat reporter for the Arizona basketball team, including when the Wildcats won the 1996-97 NCAA title. He has also written articles for CollegeAD.com, Bleacher Report, Lindy’s Sports, TucsonCitizen.com, The Arizona Republic, Sporting News and Baseball America, among many other publications. He has also authored the book “The Highest Form of Living”, which is available at Amazon. He became an educator five years ago and is presently a special education teacher at Gallego Fine Arts Intermediate in the Sunnyside Unified School District
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