EMPORIUM, Pa. — There’s no easy way to get here, to this steadily shrinking town that time forgot in the Allegheny Mountains, and certainly not from the biggest stage in college basketball at the University of Kentucky. And vice versa. But since Nate Sestina is about to become the first person in the history of Emporium, Pa., to play for a national powerhouse, retracing his steps to the hidden place that shaped him figures to be an informative exercise. If not an uncomplicated one.
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The closest airport is in State College, but a flight there from Louisville (and through Detroit) is only the beginning. Rent a car, point it in the opposite direction of Penn State’s sprawling campus and head into the hills for a nearly two-hour zig-zag to the north. Everyone who has made this twisting trek on tight roadways will offer the same warning: “Be really careful, especially if you’re coming after dark.” On a bright spring day, however, it’s like driving into a Bob Ross painting. The breathtaking corkscrew through the countryside carries you up Quehanna Highway to Wykoff Run Road to Bucktail Trail, past places with names such as Driftwood and Shingle Hollow, across Mosquito Creek and the Susquehana River, snaking into Elk State Forest and alongside the shimmering Sinnamohoning Creek. You drive slowly but arrive suddenly.
Once here, it seems the entire population of Emporium – about 1,500 and falling – has been expecting me. Don and Ricki Sestina insisted I stay at their house as if there was really any other lodging option, and they might’ve made a few phone calls to let folks know a reporter was coming to this tucked-away town to write about their son Nate. Word travels fast when everyone you know lives within three-quarters of a square mile. So whether it’s at the Pizza Palace or the post office or the library, inside a next door neighbor’s living room or St. Mark’s Church, up on Moore Hill or down the hallways of Cameron County High School, everyone has a story to tell about the boy who grew up to be a 6-foot-9, 245-pound man with shoulders broad and strong enough to hold the hope of an entire community.
Several of them get choked up trying to explain who Nate Sestina is and what his transfer to play for, of all places, the Kentucky Wildcats means to an economically depressed place that needs something like that to brag about.
“I can’t think of a nicer young man to be a symbol of pride in our community,” says Mark Bennett, an earth science teacher who has watched the high school’s graduating classes go from 85 or 100 students to half that over the last two decades. “It’s nice to get a little recognition for a small town like this, because there are a lot of good people here, everyday heroes who just get up and do what they have to do for their families. Nate is something positive that we can all get behind and be proud of — an ambassador who represents the best of us.”
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“Nate is everybody’s. Nate is ours,” says Wendy Goulding, a longtime family friend. She’s explaining how Facebook lit up after Bucknell games this season, when Sestina averaged 15.8 points and 8.5 rebounds and sank 38 percent of his 3-pointers for the Bison, because damn near everyone who lives here made the 250-mile roundtrip at some point to cheer for Emporium’s first Division I player since the 1970s. He always made it worth their time and gas money, because he’d stay on the court long after games ended to sign autographs and pose for pictures that became instant social media postcards. It’s worth noting here that not many — if any — folks around here knew or cared anything about Bucknell’s program before Sestina arrived four years ago. Now the team’s schedule posters are taped in windows all over town. There are navy-and-orange lawn flags. Half the population owns at least one Bison basketball T-shirt, most of which feature Nate’s No. 4.
When Bucknell played at St. Bonaventure, which is just 50 miles from Emporium, his great uncle organized a traveling party of almost 400 to go see him play. There’s already some buzz about a caravan to Lexington this fall — a much tougher trip at 500 miles and nearly nine hours each way by car — when as a graduate transfer, Nate becomes the latest one-and-done of a different kind for John Calipari. While former five-star recruits EJ Montgomery and Nick Richards test the NBA Draft waters, Sestina is technically (if temporarily) the only scholarship big man on the 2019-20 roster. Wardrobes in Emporium are being updated accordingly, Bucknell’s navy blue being phased out in favor of Kentucky’s more royal hue.
“There are kids that might not deserve this, but Nate deserves it,” says Goulding, who already has a Photoshopped picture of Sestina in a Wildcats uniform on the wall behind her desk at the school superintendent’s office. “You guys are lucky. Oh, you are so lucky. You get to have our Nate for a year.”
Before he belonged to all of Emporium, Nate was the baby of Don and Ricki’s five children, little brother to a pair of future Marines, Jason and Andrew. The three boys crammed into one walk-in-closet-sized bedroom in their modest house on 4th Street — the Sestinas have called the residence home for 26 years — right in the middle of town and just around the corner from the junior/senior high school where Don teaches seventh-grade geography and 11th-grade U.S. government. Ricki went back to work as a teacher’s aide at the elementary school after Nate entered kindergarten, but for many years the family of seven scraped by on a single schoolteacher’s salary.
“And I’m proud of it,” Don says. “They learned the word ‘no.’ ”
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Most folks around here know that word well. The median household income in Emporium in 2017 was $33,080, with 21.3 percent of the population living below the poverty line. In its heyday, when the Sylvania factory was cranking out radio and picture tubes and ramping up production for various wartime efforts, the population was nearly twice what it is today. That factory closed decades ago, though, and the town is now propped up – just barely – by the powder metals industry. In a 2009 Pittsburgh Post-Gazette story about Emporium natives making difficult decisions about whether to abandon their hometown, one resident put it in sad, stark terms: “Anything that I ever wanted was here, except for a job.”
Now imagine Don Sestina, who grew up here and has watched the world forget this place even exists, sitting in his well-worn recliner when the phone rang the day after his son entered the NCAA’s transfer portal and Hall of Fame coach John Calipari was on the other end.
“Coach Cal knew our names,” says Don, still in disbelief as he recounts it weeks later. “I asked him if I could put the phone down for a second. I looked at Ricki like, ‘Is this really happening?’ and I got back on the phone and said, ‘Coach, I just wanted to make sure I didn’t shit myself, because it’s not every night that John Calipari calls the Sestina household.’ ”
Because of an injury during his freshman season in college, a Patriot League rule prohibiting athletically motivated redshirts and a tiny Bucknell graduate school program that didn’t have a place for him, Sestina was suddenly one of the top grad-transfer prospects in the country – and three coaches with connections to Kentucky made sure Calipari and assistant Tony Barbee were among the first to make contact. Bucknell assistant Joe Meehan knew Calipari from coaching his son, Brad, on an international trip last summer, and two of Sestina’s former grassroots coaches either worked for Calipari (Daryn Freedman at Massachusetts and the New Jersey Nets) or played for him (Almamy Thiero at Memphis). All of them agreed: You need this guy. So Calipari and Barbee made quick work of the recruitment.
A few days after the initial call, the Sestinas drove 3½ hours to Pittsburgh to fly to Lexington for an official visit. The high-end steak at Tony’s dazzled them, but what sold them was an intense film session with assistant coach Kenny Payne, who works with UK’s post players. His presentation included a promise to push beyond what is believed possible. Nate committed to the Cats before he left town.
“The thing that impressed all of us the most about them was their brutal honesty,” Don says. “They watched game film of him and saw that he has a great outside shot, a soft midrange jumper, he’s money from the free-throw line and can dunk on your head. But they also saw things in his game that he needs to work on, and they told us that.”
Ricki, who is from the Pittsburgh area, same as Calipari, loved that the coach was late to breakfast on the last day of their visit because he’d been attending a Catholic mass that ran long. When I showed up in Emporium, the Sestinas’ first stop on the tour – after feeding me – is their church. The next morning, after waking up early to make blueberry French toast, Ricki prays over her own plate before eating. She bows her head once more with Don before they walk out the door for work. There’s a lot of thanksgiving these days for their son’s good fortune, with a side of disbelief. “I still can’t wrap my head around it,” Ricki says. “My little lovable, huggable Natey Tatey is going to Kentucky.”
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It feels like just yesterday she was standing on the back porch and piercing the mountain air with one of her three distinct whistles for the children, who were mostly free to roam the town and its surrounding streams and woods. “The three whistles meant dinner’s ready, phone’s for you or you’re in big trouble,” Nate remembers, and all of the Sestinas knew exactly which message was being delivered and how fast to run or pedal their bicycles home based on Mom’s pitch. Nate got the you’re-in-trouble whistle not so long ago. When Ricki caught him using profanity during a Bucknell game (she’s a great lip reader), that shrill whistle rang out from the stands and was followed by the universal parental expression of disappointment: “Nathan Michael!” He blushed as his teammates howled with laughter.
He so wants to please his parents, though, that Nate has taken to screaming “Nathan Michael!” at himself in place of curse words after missed shots or moments of frustration on the court. He knows what they’ve sacrificed for him and his siblings – Don drove Nate and brother Andrew to Pittsburgh and back at least once a week every spring and summer to get them exposure and better competition on the summer grassroots circuit – and imagines a not-so-distant future in which he can return the favor.
“The biggest reason I play is because I want them to retire on my watch,” Nate says. “That’s something I’m carrying with me to Kentucky. You see where we come from. It obviously isn’t much. Money doesn’t matter much to us, but I want everybody to be happy and taken care of. That’s what I really appreciate about this opportunity: I can go learn how to be a pro basketball player, and nobody from here does that, ever. That’s why I chose Kentucky, because these guys make those guys. It’s like Coach Cal said: ‘Even if you don’t get to the NBA, this year can change things for you.’ The difference in salary from Belgium, where I could’ve signed a contract this year, and the first league in Spain or Australia or Japan is huge. Cal said, ‘If you want to put on for your family, this is the place to go.’ I said, ‘OK, let’s do it.’ ”
The first person to cry when I mention Nate Sestina is Julie Dubler, who lives atop Moore Hill on a beautiful, expansive piece of land overlooking the town that her husband, Gary, made a homeplace, where an elk herd that Emporium is attempting to turn into a tourist attraction often crosses at dusk. The Dublers are family friends and Nate has been coming up here since he was a kid to work (cutting grass) and play (hunting turkeys so ineffectively he’s only killed one — by accident, with his car). When Gary died of a heart attack in 2010, Nate, only 13 at the time, instinctively stepped up.
He treated Julie like a second mother, always asking how he could help around the property, and embraced her devastated 10-year-old daughter, Tess, as the little sister he never had. They memorized lines from “Dumb and Dumber” and all of the “Austin Powers” movies together. Nate learned to love “The Bold and the Beautiful.” Last Christmas, Nate gave both Julie and Tess a coffee mug with a photo of the trio together. He keeps that same photo on his desk at school.
“Everybody knows basketball Nate, and it’s fun for us to see him on TV playing too, but there’s something way deeper,” Julie Dubler says, swallowing hard and wiping away tears as she slides a plate of homemade caramel chip and pecan cookies in front of Nate, who has bellied up to her kitchen island for the umpteenth time. “Who would I tell Kentucky fans they’re getting? Somebody who is kind and generous and understanding. Somebody awesome.”
It goes like this for almost two full days in Emporium. Ask the gas station cashier, “Do you know Nate Sestina?” and eyes twinkle. “He put our little town on the map.” At least three people repeat that exact sentence to me.
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“Everybody in town is talking about Nate going to Kentucky,” says Char Hibbler, the high school librarian. “Whether you’re 8 or 88, everybody knows and loves him.”
The high school athletic director, Mark Guido, is Emporium’s postmaster by day. “When I work the counter, that’s all people talk about: ‘How about Nate? You see the news about Nate?’ ” Guido grew up here when times were better and Cameron County High didn’t have to scrap the baseball team for lack of interest or consider combining with another school just to field a full roster in football. This sense of community pride Sestina has rekindled is sort of a throwback.
Coincidentally, Guido was a student at Clarion when Calipari played there and they went head-to-head in a few pick-up games. If he’s honest, Guido wasn’t a big fan of the brash young guy back then. He’s come around on Calipari the coach, but “I’m a Duke fan,” Guido says, making this next sentence a big one: “I told Nate he’s the only person who could get me to root for Kentucky. Probably just one year.”
“People flock to Nate, wanting his time, and he is always happy to see them and treats every one of them like they are the most important person in the world,” says Paul Siebert, the priest who baptized Nate as a baby. “What a simple but powerful kindness. He is a natural gatherer of people.” So when the church made a giant Valentine’s Day card to send Nate this year, about 100 people signed it.
Dave and Lori Reed have lived next door for all of Nate’s life, and Lori swears she isn’t exaggerating to say he is “one of the nicest human beings I’ve ever met.” The Reeds, who gave him the basketball goal that’s in his backyard, never minded the thump-thump-thump at all hours. Sometimes Dave looked out the window late on a sub-freezing January night, after Nate’s team had won a game by 20, and there he was under the street lamp working on whatever shots he’d missed in an otherwise dominant performance.
Nate once befriended a boy with special needs in his class and made a fan for life in the process; the boy traveled to Bucknell several times to see him play and plans to find a way to Lexington at least once next season. “So many younger kids looked up to him and he would stop whatever he was doing to give them attention,” says Lee Sines, Cameron County’s shop teacher for the last 20 years. “I think that’s all about the family. His parents raised modest, caring kids.”
Robin Agliardo, the school nurse, thinks a long while about how to describe Nate. “He’s just … perfect,” she finally decides. “He’s a big deal in Emporium, but none of that has gone to his head.” Bill Faulk, another of Nate’s science teachers at Cameron County, will soon be the proud owner of a Kentucky T-shirt he never knew he needed, “because nothing like this has ever happened here, one of us having an opportunity like this, and it’s very exciting.” The word us is another popular one in conversations about Nate.
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“In high school, he’d find my daughter, who was 2 or 3 years old then, and put her on his shoulders during warmups. It’s something she’ll never forget,” says Becky Darr, who taught Nate math and tried to always catch him when he’d spontaneously call out a trust fall in the hallways and tip over blindly backward. “I don’t think it’ll matter how big he gets, he will never forget us,” she says, which is why she vows to find a way to see him play in person for Kentucky this season.
Jesse Grovanz, an English teacher, produces a clipping from the local newspaper — Sestina is on the front page that week for his commitment to Kentucky – featuring a photo of her little girl holding up a tiny fish she’d caught. Someone, guess who, had cut it out and added a note: “What a great catch! We’ll have to go fishing next year! Love, Nate.” It is little wonder when Grovanz’s daughter was asked to name the three most famous people she knows, she listed two Buffalo Bills stars and Sestina.
He honors his first crush, Kendyl Shaffer, who died of leukemia in the ninth grade, by trying to make sick children smile during hospital visits. Just as he has since 2016 at Bucknell, he’ll hang a sweatshirt in his locker at Kentucky that belonged to family friend Hope Bailey, who was killed in a car accident during his sophomore year of college. Sestina made one Bucknell cafeteria worker cry upon discovering that he was Nate’s answer to a question in the game program: If you won a million dollars and couldn’t give it to a friend or family member, who would it be? He showed up to the birthday party for the little boy of another food-service worker … at 8 o’clock on a Saturday morning during the first week of preseason practice.
“When you’re a kid, you hold these athletes up like they’re larger than life, and now I think about how Nate is going to be one of those guys at Kentucky. He already is one of those guys to people here,” says Jon Songer, who took Sestina’s older sister to prom and then coached him at Cameron County. “To think about him having that opportunity is just insane to me. For kids from Emporium, and not just here but any small town, I think Nate is so inspirational.”
“You want to tell kids, ‘Dream big,’ but I’m also a realist and something like this just doesn’t happen here,” says Daphne Garzel, who has taught across the hall from Nate’s dad for the past 20 years. “So to watch it happen here, who am I to say that anymore?”
Sure, it’s hard to get from Lexington to Emporium – harder still to get from Emporium to Lexington – but both trips are certainly worth it. Follow the winding roads and you might learn something.
Like that Don Sestina first wondered whether he had a sports prodigy on his hands when he heard 5-year-old Nate in the backyard singing the Sports Center highlight ditty – dunna-nuh, dunna-nuh! – in between three stations: He’d throw himself a pop fly, toss himself a touchdown pass (before striking the Heisman pose) and then bury a game-winning jump shot. Then repeat the circuit over and over and over.
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Follow the meandering “crick,” as folks here call it, and discover how the military service of his brothers – their grueling training, the horrors that Jason saw in combat in Afghanistan – reprogrammed Nate’s perception of what is difficult and how far a body can be pushed. “Jason wouldn’t talk to me about what he saw over there until recently,” he says, “and it gave me a different appreciation. I wake up going, ‘Man, I don’t want to go to class today,’ and he woke up saying, ‘I really hope I make it through today.’ ”
Come to this town that time forgot, this place Nate Sestina is making people remember, and you’ll see how a boy could grow up into a man about whom no one has a cross word to say and who can travel the distance from Emporium to Bucknell to the University of Kentucky. Because Ricki has those three whistles and everyone in Emporium is watching. “Doing the wrong thing really isn’t an option,” Nate says with a shrug. It’s really that simple.
(Top photo: Raj Mehta/USA Today Sports)