Chelsea Dybantsa sometimes struggles to enter her son’s room. It’s empty much of the year now, a reminder that AJ Dybantsa is far from home, chasing his basketball dreams.
The most bittersweet days for Chelsea are when Dybantsa does return to his Brockton, Mass., home. They don’t come often — he plays both high school and AAU out west — and she wants to maximize their short times together as a family.
“It actually gets harder, just because I want him to be here, and we know that there's a part of us that's not in the house,” Chelsea said.
AJ Dybantsa is widely considered the top high school player in the country. He’s the most highly-touted prospect from Massachusetts since Patrick Ewing 40 years ago. His follower count (170,000 on Instagram) is climbing, he’s endorsed by Nike, and he’s drawing crowds even as he strolls casually through airports. Dybantsa becoming an eventual NBA Draft lottery pick in two years isn’t just a possibility — it’s the expectation.
Last school year, Dybantsa suited up for Prolific Prep in Napa, Calif., a powerhouse basketball program 47 miles north of San Francisco and 3,000 miles from Brockton. This year, he’s transferring to fast-rising Utah Prep. His schedule is filled with local obligations even when he comes home. On June 5, two days removed from a visit to BYU and a red-eye flight to Boston, Dybantsa took an interview on Hot 96.9 radio, then promptly went to Trinity Catholic Academy in Brockton, where he gave away Nike shoes and gear to students at his middle school alma mater.
One Trinity Catholic student asked Dybantsa about his summer plans. As he rattled them off – including Team USA tryouts in Colorado, the FIBA U17 World Cup in Turkey, the Nike Peach Jam in South Carolina, then more basketball abroad in China — the audience collectively gasped.
The distance, travel, and outside noise are testing the Dybantsa family bonds. So far, the quintet is unshakeable.
“I’m very family-oriented. Everything I do is for my family,” Dybantsa told New England Basketball Journal.
Watch Dybantsa play, or listen to him talk, and you’ll notice glimpses of both his parents. When he’s locked into the moment, his stern focus is close to Chelsea. He’s also self-assured and direct like his father, Anicet “Ace” Dybantsa Sr., both on the court and on camera. Take his interview from May with Stadium’s Shams Charania, for example:
““How do you handle rankings?” Charania asked Dybantsa. “How do you feel the next few years — guys go up, guys go down — how do you personally view that?”
“Never cared, never will care,” Dybantsa said. “That’s about it.”
Ace Dybantsa is similarly a straight shooter, the wall between Dybantsa and the swarm of people trying to latch onto the young star. He’s a Boston University police officer, but he’ll trade shifts and map out vacation time so he can be with his son nearly every weekend.
If a college coach wants to recruit Dybantsa, they have to talk to Ace. If an agent wants to represent Dybantsa? Their business pitch goes to Ace. If someone gets Dybantsa’s number? He’ll tell them to talk to his dad first.
Ace said that last year, someone offered him close to a million dollars, just to be the sole representative for Dybantsa’s future business negotiations.
“I said, ‘I'm 56 years old — never been a millionaire in my life.’ He said to me, ‘What's your point?’” Dybantsa recalled. “I said, ‘If I can wait 56 years, what is two [more]?’”
Ace has lived in the United States for 35 years, and though non-judgemental, he proudly shares he has never lived on welfare. He was born in Brazzaville, the capital of the Republic of the Congo, and as the eighth of 11 children, had nieces and nephews who were older than him.
At 13, Ace joined older brother Aime in France to pursue a better education, and also helped take care of his brother’s children. Ace then came to the United States at 21, where he was a soccer goalie at Massasoit Community College, and helped his cousin raise two kids.
“I was a dad before I became a dad,” Ace said.
Chelsea is also an immigrant. She lived with her grandmother in Hanover Parish, Jamaica, before moving to Mattapan, Mass., at 13 years old to reunite with her mother and extended family, who had already come to the U.S. for better opportunities. At first, Chelsea struggled to bridge the differences between American English and Jamaican Patois, but she went on to attend English High in Boston, graduate from Brighton High, and then graduate from Salem State in 1996.
But despite being 5-foot-10, Chelsea wasn’t an athlete or sports fan. Then in 2005, while Ace was looking for parking at a gym, he saw Chelsea and promptly decided to shoot his shot.
“I actually got into sports when I met Ace,” Chelsea said. “Before that, I wasn't a sports girl at all, as tall as I am. Folks recruited me to play basketball, even in college, and I had no interest in basketball.”
AJ Dybantsa is the middle child between older sister Samarra and younger sister Jasmyn. His basketball origin story is already well-told: Ace, in an attempt to catch his son’s interest, bought toddler-age Dybantsa a Spiderman-themed basketball hoop that got him hooked.
Dybantsa trained with and drew inspiration from late local icon Terrence Clarke. During the COVID-19 pandemic, he locked in on basketball. Dybantsa told the students at Trinity Catholic that one time during a Zoom class, he brought his laptop outside and turned off his camera so he could practice.
Ace saw Dybantsa pour himself into workouts in Middletown, R.I., with trainer Joe Saunders. Ace and Chelsea had drilled discipline into their children, so much so that when the siblings traveled to visit Ace’s family in France, they were still doing their push-up routines abroad. Those early family lessons continue to power Dybantsa’s basketball development.
“Easily, someone in my position could stop working because they already feel like they've gotten successful,” Dybantsa said. “But even if you are successful, in my case, stay in the gym, but in anybody's case, perfect your craft.”
Dybantsa says he doesn’t get starstruck. Last summer, he worked out with LeBron James, Kevin Durant, Chris Paul, Jordan Poole, and more NBA players. He confidently directed plays during pickup games. He’s built a connection with Jaylen Brown, who invited him on the floor during warmups for a Celtics game this past season. Ace’s favorite basketball player, Hakeem Olajuwon, spent several minutes teaching Dybantsa his trademark “Dream Shake” moves during April’s Nike EYBL session in Memphis. Ace was even more in awe than AJ.
“It was incredible,” he said. “A Hall of Famer talking to my son. Man, I still got chills thinking about it.”
Dybantsa played two years at St. Sebastian’s and won Massachusetts Gatorade Player of the Year as a freshman. His name began to spread, as Chelsea put it, like “wildfire.” St. Sebastian’s didn’t typically draw big crowds to its road games, but gyms filled wherever Dybantsa went. He transferred to Prolific Prep to seek out the highest level of high school competition and to accommodate his growing spotlight.
College coaches are flocking to Dybantsa — well, to Ace first — with scholarships. As of June, practically any powerhouse you can think of has offered Dybantsa: Duke, Kentucky, Kansas, North Carolina, USC, Michigan, Florida State, Arkansas, Auburn, Baylor, Alabama, plus locals UConn, Boston College and Providence, make up about half the list.
In early May, Dybantsa worked out with some of this year’s NBA Draft hopefuls, including projected lottery pick Reed Sheppard. As Ace tells it, following the workout, Sheppard asked his agent where Dybantsa was going to college.
“The agent goes, ‘He’s a junior in high school,’” Ace said. “[Sheppard] goes, ‘Oh hell no, I’m calling [John] Calipari.’”
Chelsea reminds her son that his blessings can be taken away. She’ll send him examples of NBA stars who made off-court mistakes as pros, like Delonte West or Ja Morant.
“Just to show him, you gotta keep the correct people around you, because [some] will let you down,” Chelsea said.
She also worries. Chelsea rarely travels and usually stays in Brockton while Dybantsa is away. When he texts Chelsea, her first instinct is to brace for a problem, but Dybantsa is typically just checking in on his mom.
Ace will occasionally take Dybantsa out for dinner so the two can have father-son time away from basketball. And Dybantsa is extremely close with Samarra and Jasmyn — so much so that Ace had the kids make a separate group chat for themselves so his phone would stop blowing up with their messages. If Dybantsa tries a new food, or Jasmyn finds a funny meme, they’ll text each other immediately.
“It feels like everything we do, we send to the group chat,” Dybantsa said.
“When we go out of town to see AJ, you can see all three of them, their eyes lit up,” Chelsea said. “When we go out to dinner, he will sit between the sisters and they start hitting each other. … And I love that. I always tell Ace, whenever they are around each other, it brings me joy, just because they genuinely love each other.”
Those connections help ease the stress on Dybantsa, whose world will only get more intense and public. He has the big college decision looming, senior year, and the intention of going one-and-done to the NBA within two years. But Dybantsa isn’t bothered. He’s considering starting a YouTube channel to document his daily life, to break down the walls that young athletes often put up as they manage their public appearance.
“There's pressure on everybody, but it’s just the game that I love,” Dybantsa said. “It’s not a job yet, so I'm still having fun with it and still just playing for the greater fun of it.”
Dybantsa played on Team World at the Nike Hoop Summit in April. He represented both the Congo and Jamaica, having recently obtained citizenship in both countries, in a nod to his family’s heritage.
Chelsea continues to cook a traditional Jamaican meal: jerk chicken, rice and beans (beans are actually known as peas in Jamaica), fried plantains, cabbage, codfish and spinach. Every few years, the family travels to visit Jamaica or the Congo. Ace will take them to his parents’ gravesite.
“Yes, I’m in America, but I’m African. Always will be,” Ace said. “That’s what I’m trying to teach my kids.”
Dybantsa is similarly showing love to his childhood home. In interviews, he deliberately mentions he’s from Brockton, even though saying Greater Boston or Massachusetts might be more recognizable to others. Dybantsa references Brockton’s nickname as the “city of champions” and its great boxers Rocky Marciano and Marvin Hagler.
“I feel like Brockton’s on the map,” he said. “It kind of died down over the years, and I think it’s my job to bring it back.”
Ace doesn’t get noticed too much in Brockton, but it’s happening more often. He recently went to the bank and was stopped by a random stranger, who told him, “Your son is a monster, keep it going!”
The praise is nice — but Ace, Chelsea, and AJ each said they won’t let fame change their family.
“We’re still going to be the Dybantsas,” Ace said. “You see us on the street, [we’ll say] hello. You need help, we're gonna help you. As far as that, nothing's gonna change.
“Our life’s definitely gonna change. I understand that. Us? Our people? No. We’re still humble. We’re a humble family.”
