Longtime Braddock boys’ basketball coach Willie Diaz retires after four decades

Willie Diaz, who has been coaching boys’ basketball in Miami for 43 years – including the past 27 seasons at Braddock High – has retired.

His final day as a teacher at Braddock came last week.

Diaz’s significance in local coaching circles can’t be measured in only wins and losses. His career record is just 453-487 in 38 seasons as a head coach at Southridge and Braddock.

Prior to that, he was a Coral Gables assistant for four years and an assistant for one season at his alma mater, Coral Park.

Diaz, 67, won three district titles in his career – two at Southridge (1986 and 1988) and one at Braddock (2020).

Some of his best work came at Southridge, a school that was established in 1974. Diaz took over the Southridge program in 1983, and he stayed there for 11 years.

“I helped build that program from the ground up,” Diaz said, “instilling discipline, creating culture and teaching players to be committed in terms of going to class and to practice.”

Trevor Ferguson, now 53, played for Diaz at Southridge.

“He had an old ‘Scooby-Doo’ van, and he would take all his players home after practices and games,” Ferguson said. “This was not just one time. This was night in and night out, even though he had to get home to his own family.

“But he treated us all as if we were his sons.”

Ferguson said Southridge was a football school when he got there. The basketball players had to supply their own shoes and socks.

But, by the end of Ferguson’s three years at the school, Diaz had built the program up enough that they all had three uniforms and Nike shoes.

“Coach ‘D’ built that program,” Ferguson said. “He was a hard-nosed disciplinarian. We would have to turn in academic progress reports or we wouldn’t play.

“He was a father figure and later a friend.”

Diaz, who has four grown kids and three grandchildren, said he was raised on old-school values.

“I believe in hard work,” said Diaz, who played Division III basketball at MacMurray College in Jacksonville, Illinois after a two-year stint at Miami Dade College. “But I’ve started to see a change in society. Kids don’t have the same desire to win.

“Because of that, I started to think that maybe this was the right time for me to step down.”

At a retirement ceremony held at the Braddock auditorium this past Saturday, many former players showed up and said that they grew up without a father.

In many ways, Diaz was their father.

“We were boys going into this program, and he molded us into men,” said former Braddock player Anthony Marante, 22. “He taught us respect and good morals. He was a life coach.

“Playing for him was the best four years of my life. He was a once-in-a-lifetime person.”

Added Ferguson about his Southridge days: “We won a district title – varsity and JV – by the third year I was there. But it wasn’t just about winning.

“It was about saving kids – and he saved a lot of them.”