National Basketball Association

Sterner's New Nba Position: Sixers Scout

Published Oct. 18, 2010 10:12 p.m. ET

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Tom Sterner - once the head boys' basketball coach at Lancaster Catholic, once an assistant at Franklin & Marshall - was recently hired as an advance scout for the 76ers, meaning he will spend this season on the road, dissecting future Sixers opponents.

He figures to unearth few surprises; everyone in the NBA knows what everyone else runs. But this is a matter of creating the smallest of advantages, of putting oneself in the best possible position to succeed.

After all, he said, "Basketball is a reaction game." And he wants his newest team, the fourth for which he has worked in pro basketball, to be able to respond correctly to whatever it might face.

As he has, in a much larger sense.

Sterner, one month away from his 54th birthday, is two decades into an NBA career he never figured upon, having worked previously as an assistant coach for Orlando, Golden State, Orlando again and Dallas.

He has worked for teams that have won as many as 60 games and as few as 36. He has worked for coaches that lasted forever, like the late Chuck Daly, and those whose shelf life was considerably shorter, like Eric Musselman. He has worked with Shaquille O'Neal and Dirk Nowitzki, Gilbert Arenas and Tracy McGrady, Cherokee Parks and Earl Boykins.

All because he has been able to take full advantage of the opportunities presented to him. It is true that he has had the right connections, his lifelong friend John Gabriel foremost among them. But that has only gotten him in the door a time or two. He has survived this long because of his smarts (he was ahead of the pro-basketball curve on computers, for instance) and his work ethic.

"I just want to be really good," he said, "at whatever I do."

Which would appear to be the case, and explains why he wasn't out of work long when his contract with the Mavericks expired after the 2009-10 season, the last of two he spent in Dallas.

Sterner spoke with Washington assistant Randy Wittman, with whom he had worked years ago, in Orlando. Wittman mentioned Sterner's name to Courtney Witte, the Sixers' director of player personnel and a man Wittman has known since both played under Bob Knight at Indiana University.

And in the meantime Sixers assistant Brian James, Sterner's longtime friend, put in a good word for him.

Wasn't too long before Sterner had a new job.

"The NBA," he said, "is a small, small community."

He and his wife Marcia, a speech pathologist, live in Orlando, as they have for years. (The couple has two daughters, Malorie, 23, and Paige, 19.) But Tom will be away as many as 100 nights this season, which for the Sixers begins Wednesday, Oct. 27, when the powerful Miami Heat visits the Wells Fargo Center. That first week alone, he will travel to Boston, Memphis, Charlotte and Atlanta.

"Especially early, through November, December and January, you're trying to see everybody twice before we play them," he said. "That's live, not including what we watch on film."

All in hopes of finding a chink, however tiny, in an opponent's armor.

"Certain guys in the NBA are flat-out special," he said. "You have to come out with a strategy to slow them down, or they'll eat you alive."

And forget the tiresome notion that nobody plays defense in the NBA.

"The average NBA team will take you out of your first or second [offensive] option," he said. "The better NBA teams will take you out of your third and fourth."

Sterner has come full circle with the Sixers, having first worked for them as a video guy at their F&M-based training camp in the fall of 1982, the season Moses Malone and Julius Erving led the team to an NBA title.

Sterner was not far removed from Millersville University, where he earned a degree in elementary education, and Temple University, where he earned his masters in sports administration and computers. He was also early in his career at Catholic High, where he coached from 1981-87; a three-year stint at F&M would follow.

Gabriel, who had risen from the ticket office to the role of video coordinator with the Sixers, put the team onto his friend. He and Sterner had known each other since they were second-graders growing up in Hanover, and would in time lead Delone Catholic to a state hoops title. And they had never fallen out of touch.

So every afternoon Sterner would tape the Sixers' scrimmages, while Marcia compiled the stats. And months later, when the Sixers, having earned a first-round playoff bye, returned to Lancaster for a minicamp, the couple went one step further. Or at least were talked into doing so by Gabriel, who called Tom and told him he would need his house one night, so that coach Billy Cunningham and one of his assistants, Jack McMahon, could watch a Knicks-Nets playoff game; the Sixers would get the winner in the next round.

The Sterners agreed. Gabriel did some rearranging and some rewiring of their home; he bought "a certain beverage," as Sterner said. And everything went off without a hitch.

"It was kind of like surreal," Sterner said.

The postscript is that the Sixers wound up facing the Knicks, whom they swept to start the fo'-fi'-fo' run to the title, as foretold (sort of) by Malone.

The Sterners performed their camp duties every fall through 1989. The following summer Tom was in the process of applying for a coaching job at Carnegie Mellon when he contacted Gabriel, by that point an executive with the fledgling Magic, about a letter of recommendation. Gabriel suggested Sterner might want to come down to Orlando and become the team's video coordinator instead.

He held that post for four years, then served as one of the Magic's assistants for eight, working under Brian Hill, Richie Adubato, Daly and Doc Rivers. Then he spent two years in Golden State, where he was Musselman's top assistant. Then it was back to Orlando for two more seasons. Then Dallas for two. (There were also two years in there where he was without work. The first one, '04-05, left him feeling "miserable," he said. During the second - '07-08 - he helped coach Paige's soccer team. Broke down film and everything.)

Sterner's friend Ken Spence, a longtime Lancaster-Lebanon League basketball referee, often reminds him that he once said he would never coach in the NBA. That he could never picture himself handling the egos. But Sterner has been pleasantly surprised on that front, saying most players work harder then he might have imagined.

So, he said, "Twenty-one years later, I've learned a valuable lesson: Never say never."

He had already learned the most valuable lesson of all: Seize every opportunity that comes your way.

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