Four years have gone by since Kinard Dozier last suited up for the Dedham High basketball team. As a senior, the Marauders put together a 21-2 record and won the Bay State Conference Herget Division title but fell a point short of reaching the MIAA Division 3 South sectional final with a 46-45 loss to Norwell in the semifinals.
If they had the player that the two-time Herget Division MVP has become, it may have been the difference between having the final game come at Milton High or a possible return trip to the FleetCenter or even the DCU Center in Worcester, where the big hardware gets handed out.
According to Dozier, he was a forward trapped in a 6-foot-1 body. He understood that he needed to improve if he was going to have the opportunity to play basketball at a high level in college. After graduating from Dedham, he attended The Winchendon School for a postgraduate year. There he got to play alongside four current Division I players in Alex Oriakhi and Jamal Coombs (Connecticut), Malcolm Grant (Miami via Villanova) and Mike Ringgold (Rider).
“I had to develop my point guard and shooting guard skills and get my ball handling together, and (at Winchendon is) when I really started working on my ball handling, working on my shot and make sure I’m going to be ready to get into college because I know I’m not going to be a forward in college, especially at a competitive Division II school.”
His attempts to improve himself have not stopped as he recently wrapped up his junior year at Franklin Pierce University in Rindge, N.H.
“He’s become a much better, more consistent shooter,” said FPU head coach David Chadbourne. “When it comes down to it he still wants to get to the rim and that’s what he does best, and that’s one of the great traits about him, but he’s much more capable of knocking down open 3s as he was at Winchendon and even at his first two years here.”
Dozier said not knowing fundamentals caused him to shoot with two hands all throughout high school and AAU ball and it wasn’t until he broke his left pinky finger while at Winchendon that the left hand came off the ball. The result was a higher shooting percentage.
He has seen his scoring average, shooting percentage, rebounds and minutes go up in each season with the Ravens. Recruited as a shooting guard, Dozier has served as a capable alternative at the point as well - whether for short spells or to fill in because of injuries.
“(Chadbourne) really put confidence in me, he told me, ‘You can take care of the ball. You have to be able to run the team and run plays,’” said Dozier of his freshman year filling in for starter Jack Barrett. “He put all the confidence in the world in me and that’s really helped me throughout my career.”
The work Chadbourne has seen Dozier put in since he arrived on campus helped him name him a captain entering his junior season.
“He easily could have been a captain in his sophomore year, he’s got the respect of the guys because he works so hard on a daily basis,” said the 11th-year head coach. “He doesn’t sit out practices, he practices hurt, he practices sick, he plays sick, he plays hurt and there’s a lot of respect that goes with that.”
During his three years, he has gone from being named a Northeast-10 Conference All-Rookie Team selection as a freshman to the All-Academic Team as a sophomore and was recently selected All-Conference Third Team.
This past year he was second in the conference in minutes/game (36.9), 13th in scoring at 15.2 and ninth at 7.4 rebounds.
One thing he has not seen go up during his time at Franklin Pierce is the team’s fortunes – finishing below .500 in all three seasons. This year, a loss in the regular season finale at home against UMass Lowell kept the Ravens out of the conference tournament, which only accepts the top 12 teams from the 16-team conference. Franklin Pierce was 12-15 overall, but 7-15 in the NE-10, finishing a game behind Pace for the final spot.
The problem was not their inability to play well against the top teams in the league – Dozier scored a career-high 27 points and laid a ball in with a second remaining to give the Ravens a 72-70 win at Bentley, ranked 10th in the country at the time. Just as they might win a road game like that, they also fell to teams that finished beneath them in the standings, opening conference play at St. Michael’s with a loss and also losing at New Haven.
“We’re a very talented team, but we don’t play consistent enough,” said Dozier. “We’ll beat, as we did, Bentley and Adelphi that were the top ranked teams in the conference and we’ll play with Stonehill, who was the best team in the conference, but we’ll also lose to the worst teams like University of New Haven and St. Michael’s, who didn’t make the tournament. We can’t let that happen. We have to come in day in and day out and work at the top of our ability every game. If we do that, we’ll definitely be a force to reckon with, but until that time we have to keep on working to get to that level.”
(Keith Pearson is Staff Writer for the Dedham Transcript. He can be reached at (781) 433-8371 or kpearson@cnc.com.)
