National and regional media have flooded Whitehall High School for content on Saquon Barkley to the point that the Zephyrs are having a media day event on Monday morning to deal with all of the attention.
That’s what happens when your school was once home to one of the most popular and well-known athletes on the planet.
But while Barkley has put Whitehall High School and his hometown of Coplay in the spotlight ahead of the Super Bowl, there’s another Lehigh Valley and Eastern Pennsylvania Conference product playing in New Orleans next Sunday.
Wide receiver Jahan Dotson is the first Nazareth player to ever compete in a Super Bowl and those who know the former Blue Eagles and Penn State standout are as thrilled for him as the Whitehall community is for Barkley.
In his first season with the Eagles after two years in Washington, Dotson had 19 catches for 216 yards in the regular season. His first touchdown for Philly came in the wild-card round playoff game against Green Bay when he caught an 11-yard TD pass for the first score of the game.
“We’re very proud of Jahan because he’s one of the best people to come through our program, let alone football player,” Nazareth athletic director Ray Ramella said. “We always talked about him when he was here that there was something different about him. We’ve seen those players come through the Valley who have had that ‘it factor.’ Jahan had that and the best thing about him is that he had a good head on his shoulders and a family that supported him. He checked all of the boxes.”
Ramella, head football coach Tom Falzone and everyone in the Nazareth community is happy for Dotson, and knows he doesn’t mind deferring to Barkley and others when it comes to the limelight.
“I’ve talked to him throughout the year and you know Jahan always does the right thing,” Ramella said. “You know that when he’s on the field he’s going to finish every block, run every route as hard as he can. He’s been waiting for his chance and in the last game of the regular season against the Giants they rested all of the starters. We went down to Philly to see him play and he had like seven catches for 94 yards. He looked like the Jahan we know out there. When he gets those opportunities, he’s going to capitalize on them.”
At Nazareth, Dotson had stellar freshman and sophomore seasons in 2014 and ’15. He had 125 catches for 1,866 yards and 25 touchdowns during those seasons and was a Morning Call first-team all-area player both of those seasons.
He left for a year at the Peddie School in New Jersey, but returned to play football and basketball as a senior at Nazareth in the 2017-18 school year. He caught 62 passes for 889 yards and had a District 11-best 15 TD receptions in his final high school year. He was orginally to UCLA, but after the Bruins changed coaches, Dotson changed his mind and opted for Penn State.
As a Nittany Lion, he played in 42 games, making 38 starts. He caught 183 passes for 2,757 yards and 25 touchdowns.
He was taken by Washington with the 16th pick in the first round of the 2022 draft.
“Jahan and Saquon are close and when Jahan was going through his recruiting process here, he reached out to Saquon who helped him quite a bit,” Ramella said. “Although they were never on the same team at Penn State, their bond grew stronger and that relationship has obviously continued to this day. It’s so cool that they’re finally teammates as Eagles and going to the Super Bowl.”
Falzone said Dotson is the best receiver he’s ever coached and the best to ever come through Nazareth.
“I think a lot of people doubted him in this whole process,” Falzone said. “When he went to college people doubted he was big enough to play at Penn State in the Big Ten. He excelled at Penn State and made us all so proud there. And then people questioned whether he could play in the NFL and he becomes a first-round draft pick and proved everybody wrong there, too.”
His athleticism and play-making ability is unquestioned, and Falzone said some of the things he has seen from Dotson were amazing.
“But he’s an even better person and just a great individual,” he said. “He hasn’t forgotten his roots or where he has come from. He always has a busy schedule, but when he comes home to see his mom and dad, he always stops by the school to visit us. He makes sure to come by the weight room and sometimes he does his own training and he’s running the hills outside.”
He has run his own Jahan Dotson Impact Athlete Football Camp at the Charles Chrin Center in Palmer Township the last three years. It’s a free camp in conjunction with Lehigh Valley Health Network for kids entering fifth through ninth grade.
Rob Petrosky, Nazareth’s longtime offensive coordinator, said Dotson has never been an attention-seeker or a big rah-rah guy.
“He never really got too excited even though he made a lot of spectacular plays when he was here,” Petrosky said. “And we never see him get down either. We started him as a freshman and saw the impact he could make right away. And he made us evolve a little bit offensively. We said we can’t just have this guy standing outside wide right or wide left on the line of scrimmage. We needed to move him around because defenses starting paying more attention and sent two guys to double-team him. We just needed to get the ball in his hands.”
Petrosky remembered that when Dotson returned to Nazareth for his senior year, Anthony Harris was the starting quarterback as a sophomore.
“Having a guy of Jahan’s presence and skill-set was a real blessing to Anthony,” Petrosky said. “He was a like a security blanket and took a lot of pressure off Anthony at the quarterback position.”
Petrosky runs the scoreboard at Nazareth basketball games and Dotson was a 1,000-point scorer in that sport.
“He’ll pop into a Nazareth basketball game when he’s back home and he’s always so humble,” Petrosky said. “He still cares about where he grew up. He was such a pleasure to coach and we knew he was talented. We didn’t know he’d get this far, but it’s awesome. And it’s cool to be able to say you coached Jahan Dotson and you we were part of his story growing up. Not a lot of coaches have had the opportunity to say that. It’s a real honor.”
Falzone, who first got to know Barkley when he was a teacher at Whitehall, is all in on the Eagles in their game against the Chiefs. He believes it’s a bold statement for the Lehigh Valley to have two of its own playing on the biggest stage in sports.
“You know everybody in the Lehigh Valley is going to be invested in this game more than ever,” he said. “It’s some story. Two local kids become phenomenal athletes and go to Penn State and have great careers there. Then they wind up in the NFL and play for the hometown team. And now they’re playing in a Super Bowl for that hometown team. It’s a dream come true for them and for a lot of us. Now they have that opportunity to win the whole thing. We’re all excited. Hopefully, they get it done.”
Source: Berkshire mont
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