LEXINGTON, Ky. — Ricki Sestina is just a month removed from hip-replacement surgery, so she’s walking, or more like shuffling, with a cane these days. Long-distance travel is not recommended, but missing this trip was not an option. So there she sat on Monday afternoon at the back of the room, shifting uncomfortably in a chair beside her towering husband, Don, while their 6-foot-9 son, Nate, took the podium for a farewell speech of sorts. It was his Senior Day press conference, on the eve of his final home game at Rupp Arena, where he’ll start for sixth-ranked Kentucky against Tennessee in what will be the culmination of a dream. There was no chance Ricki and Don were missing this, even if it meant a taxing trek for his hobbled and hurting mother from their tiny town of Emporium, Pa., to Pittsburgh by car and then to Lexington through Charlotte, N.C., by plane.
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“To think of my son – our son – from our little town wearing a Kentucky uniform, it’s been mind-blowing,” Ricki said, her voice breaking as tears tumbled down a smiling face. A few hours earlier, she could barely get through a recorded video message for Nate that will be played before the game. Her emotions are all over the place this week. “Pure joy mixed with some sadness that it’s coming to an end. I’ll never forget the first time he got in a game at Bucknell, when the coach called his name, Nate said, ‘I thought he wanted me to get him some water.’ So to go from that to this? Wow.”
Sestina, who didn’t expect to see his parents so early on Monday and was surprised by their appearance at the media gathering, bear-hugged both of them and then gave himself an out-loud reminder as he approached the microphone: “No swear words.” Ricki is famous in the family for an unmistakably shrill whistle, followed by screaming the first, middle and last names of her five children from the stands if they used foul language or displayed poor sportsmanship during games. But she’ll probably be too busy crying on Tuesday night to give Nate any grief. This one feels different than the senior night he celebrated last year at Bucknell before enrolling at Kentucky as a graduate transfer.
“It didn’t seem over at Bucknell,” his father said. “Now it’s real. This is the big finale.”
In some ways, this season has not gone at all like Sestina imagined – from 15.8 points and 8.5 rebounds last season with the Bison to 5.8 points and 3.8 boards with the Wildcats, battling both a broken wrist and a crisis of confidence at various points as he jumped a level in competition – but in other ways, it has been every bit as magical as he hoped. He got John Wall out of his seat, waving to the crowd at Madison Square Garden, with a 3-pointer that helped bury then-No. 1 Michigan State in the season opener. He got a double-double in his first game at Rupp Arena. He made five 3-pointers and scored 17 against Ohio State in Las Vegas with his big brother, who was on leave from the Marines, in the stands. He swished three 3-pointers in a slump-busting performance at LSU that put the Wildcats in position to win the SEC regular-season championship, then scored 11 points Saturday in the title-clinching win over Auburn.
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Don’t ask his parents to pick out a highlight.
“The whole damn season,” Don said. “Every time I see him play, my heart flutters. It’s been an awesome journey. Even being here today, a year later, it’s still totally mind-blowing. I know we keep using that word, but that’s all you can say. And it’s not naivete. It’s total respect and total awe for the program. My kid plays at Kentucky! And it didn’t come easy. Nothing was handed to him. He busted his ass to get to this place, so to watch him be part of something like this makes us prouder than you can imagine.”
This game will mark his seventh start for the Cats, but Kentucky’s old man (a whopping 22 years old) has morphed into its sixth man. He has carved out a role as a valuable contributor on a roster full of former five-star recruits (he was a zero-star prospect) and on a team that has a real chance to make the Final Four. Should the Wildcats go a step further and win their ninth national championship, the small-town kid and small-school transfer will have a big place in the program’s rich history.
“It’s everything that you wanted to happen for you: to play basketball at a high level, to play for a coach like Coach Cal, to have the teammates that I have and to have the fans that we have,” Sestina said. “It’s been everything to me. It’s been everything for my family. They’re always texting me after games, telling me that everybody in Emporium is texting them, cheering us on. I remember moving in, in June, wide-eyed and ready to get this thing going, and summer went really, really fast, and Coach was like, It’s going to be February before you know it. And it’s March now. It has just flown by, but it’s been unreal.”
One of Sestina’s former classmates at Bucknell made the trip to Rupp for the Auburn game, wearing a replica of his No. 1 jersey and holding up a “Free Sestina” sign he made when they were freshmen together. Rare has been the game that someone from back home hasn’t shown up. His mom estimates about 100 people from Emporium have attended Kentucky games this season, including a few of his high school teachers who made the eight-hour drive and the priest who baptized him at St. Mark’s Church, where crowds as large as 50 people have gathered all year in the fellowship hall to watch Nate and the Cats on a big screen.
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But see, that’s just what folks do in tight-knit towns tucked away on the side of a mountain in rural Pennsylvania. That part didn’t surprise Sestina at all. He knew those people, his people, would be there for him. What he didn’t expect was the way, in the midst of a miserable stretch when he couldn’t buy a bucket and couldn’t guard a traffic cone and started to question whether he’d made a mistake coming to a stage this big, his McDonald’s All-American teammates who soon will cash NBA paychecks rallied around him.
“The thing that surprised me most was how receptive (they were) and how much my teammates helped me out when I was going through that little slump,” he said. Sophom*ore Immanuel Quickley, the team’s leading scorer and the frontrunner for SEC player of the year, checked on him daily and “was always talking to me about keeping my head up and just keep fighting, keep working. To come into the gym late at night when you’re going through something mentally, when you’re not playing well, and have a teammate like that tell you that he believes in you, and then to have a coaching staff like we have here say they still believe in you and everything is going to come around, it means a lot.”
Those guys are just returning a favor, though. In addition to calling out where everyone is supposed to be on defense when he’s in the game — multiple opposing coaches have mentioned hearing him direct traffic like a quarterback making pre-snap adjustments — Sestina has been a big brother off the court. Back in the summer, within days of his arrival on campus, Sestina started inviting his young teammates out for coffee. He offered to make them dinner. He wanted to sit and have long talks with them about life or big laughs about trivial things. One key that insiders will cite about how this team developed into a title contender is its closeness, and there is a strong case to be made that Sestina’s early outreach was the catalyst for that.
“I think this group really came together over meals,” assistant coach Joel Justus said. “It’s amazing, I think, what meals can do for teams, what meals can do for families, and that has never been more obvious than with this team. Nate has given us tremendous leadership, being that guy that is older, that is more mature — most of the time. I like 22-year-old Nate. There’s times when he slips back into 13-year-old Nate (but) it does bring a certain kind of laugh and spirit to our team that, even last year while Reid (Travis) was that leader, Reid was very serious. While Nate is serious, he is able to relate to this group, and it’s a fun, laughing, jovial group. He tells bad jokes and laughs at even worse jokes that are told by the other guys on the team.”
Unlike many of the one-and-done freshmen who are in and out of this program in just a few months, who look up one day and their college experience is over before they can even fully unpack, Sestina showed up with a plan to pause every so often and soak it all in. He has taken a few extra beats in the big moments along the way to appreciate just how crazy it is that he’s here, at Kentucky, in the SEC, soon to be the NCAA Tournament — where he has been before, but never with any realistic expectation of playing beyond the first round. He has taken great care to make sure he remembers. And how does he want to be remembered from his time with the Wildcats?
“A great teammate, a great leader, somebody who brought smiles to everybody’s faces outside of basketball, a resource outside of the gym,” Sestina said. “Somebody guys can lean on, guys can trust. That’s something that I try to do everywhere I go, just have a relationship with everybody, something that 10 years from now they could hit me up if I’m anywhere near their city and we could go get dinner.”
Meals matter, after all. And Tuesday morning, before the last home game of a college career that has included two stops and 1,000 points, Nate planned to meet Ricki and Don for breakfast in Lexington. His father imagined they would sit across the table from each other and ask one more time the question they’ve been repeating since the day John Calipari called their house in Emporium last spring: Can you believe this?
(Photo: Derick E. Hingle / USA Today Sports)
Kyle Tucker is a staff writer for The Athletic, covering Kentucky college basketball and the Tennessee Titans. Before joining The Athletic, he covered Kentucky for seven years at The (Louisville) Courier-Journal and SEC Country. Previously, he covered Virginia Tech football for seven years at The (Norfolk) Virginian-Pilot. Follow Kyle on Twitter @KyleTucker_ATH
