Some high schools point to a single famous graduate. Bishop O’Dowd points to an NBA draft pick, an NFL receiver, an Olympic runner, and a National Book Award finalist, and one of that group wasn’t even a student. He was a computer science teacher who ended up writing the most detailed public account of O’Dowd culture that exists.
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Bishop O’Dowd’s notable alumni span professional sports and the arts: NBA forward Ivan Rabb, NFL receiver Terique Owens, Olympic distance runner Alexi Pappas, and novelist Jasmine Guillory. The school is also the real-life setting of Dragon Hoops, a National Book Award finalist graphic novel by Gene Luen Yang, who taught computer science at O’Dowd for 17 years before writing it.
Ivan Rabb: O’Dowd’s Winningest Basketball Player
Ivan Rabb is O’Dowd basketball royalty by the numbers alone: over four varsity seasons, he scored more than 2,000 points, grabbed over 1,000 rebounds, and finished with a 108-19 record, the winningest player in school history. He was named California’s Mr. Basketball and a McDonald’s All-American as a senior in 2015, played college basketball at Cal, and was selected in the second round of the 2017 NBA Draft, going on to play for the Memphis Grizzlies.
Terique Owens and O’Dowd’s NFL Pipeline
Terique Owens is O’Dowd’s most recent addition to a genuinely long list of NFL alumni that includes Tarik Glenn, Jevon Holland, Kevin King, Alijah Vera-Tucker, and Langston Walker, among others. Owens played college football at Missouri State before entering the league as a wide receiver, continuing a pipeline of O’Dowd football talent that stretches back decades.
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Alexi Pappas: From Oakland Hills to the Olympics
Alexi Pappas represented Greece as a distance runner at the 2016 Rio Olympics, one of several O’Dowd alumni to reach elite international competition. Her path from Oakland Hills cross country meets to an Olympic start line is a reminder that O’Dowd’s athletic program produces more than just its headline football and basketball names.
Gene Luen Yang: The Teacher Who Wrote the Team’s Story
Gene Luen Yang isn’t an O’Dowd graduate; he taught computer science there for 17 years. But his connection to the school produced something no alumnus has: a National Book Award finalist graphic novel, Dragon Hoops, that documents the O’Dowd Dragons’ actual 2014-15 varsity basketball season in detail, weaving in the team’s real players, coaches, and the civil rights history behind the sport itself. The book went on to win the Printz Honor, an Eisner Award, and a Harvey Award, and gives outside readers a more textured, honest look at O’Dowd’s culture than almost any admissions material could.
Novelist Jasmine Guillory, a 1993 graduate, has similarly credited her time at O’Dowd with shaping her path toward writing, going on to become a New York Times bestselling author.
What O’Dowd’s Alumni Say About the School
Across sports and the arts, O’Dowd’s most visible alumni describe a similar throughline: a school that took their specific interest seriously enough to help them go further with it, whether that meant a basketball program disciplined enough to produce a 108-19 varsity record, or a classroom culture open enough that a computer science teacher could spend nearly two decades there before becoming one of the most decorated graphic novelists in the country.
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