SUNY Old Westbury basketball coach Bernard Tomlin has dedicated most of his life to the game of basketball. Now after almost 40 years of coaching, he has surpassed 450 career wins as a head coach.
On Feb. 10, SUNY Old Westbury defeated Mount Saint Mary College 87-50, securing Tomlin’s milestone victory. Although the Panthers missed the Skyline Conference Men’s Basketball Championship, Tomlin still ended the season with 452 career wins as he capped off his 23rd season with the program.
Tomlin grew up in Malverne and began playing the sport at the age of 10. He said there weren’t many basketball camps near him growing up, leading to him teaching himself how to play.
“The fun of being in New York as a kid is that you have the Knicks and the love of professional sports teams, so you find players that you enjoy watching, and you just mimic everything they do,” he said.
Tomlin attended Malverne High School, where he set the record for most points scored in a game with 45. That record stood for decades and wasn’t broken until 2009.
He then went on to attend the University of Utah to continue playing.
Tomlin played 27 career games for the Utes. He chipped a bone in his foot during his sophomore year before ultimately deciding to return to Long Island.
“I wanted to come back home and play in front of my friends and family, so I ended up playing and graduating from Hofstra,” he said.
Tomlin averaged 15.5 points per game during his two seasons at Hofstra. He was then selected in the sixth round of the 1976 NBA Draft by the New Orleans Jazz. Tomlin never played in the NBA, instead transitioning into becoming an assistant coach at Hofstra.
Tomlin was an assistant for multiple programs before he earned his first job as a head coach for the 1986-87 season at William Patterson, a Division III school. He had spoken to the athletic director at Seton Hall at the time, Larry Keating, who told him to respect an opportunity to be a head coach, no matter what division.
Tomlin led the program to a 20-9 record in his first and only season at the school.
He then returned to Long Island yet again, this time to be the head coach at Adelphi University. After one year, Tomlin went back to being an assistant coach at DI Rhode Island and then the head coach of Stony Brook’s basketball team.
Tomlin coached the Sea Wolves for eight seasons throughout the 1990s. He won 100 games over that span. His last season with the program was in 1998-99.
Tomlin then found his current home for the 2001-02 season with SUNY Old Westbury.
Old Westbury finished the 2000-01 season with a 7-18 record, which improved to 14-11 in Tomlin’s first year. His first game with the program was an 80-68 overtime victory over Yeshiva.
The coach said he remembers walking through the lobby at halftime and hearing a student on the phone telling somebody else that they were going to win.
“We kind of really changed the culture,” Tomlin said.
Tomlin was named the Skyline Coach of the Year in his second season with the school, as SUNY Old Westbury went 16-12 and 11-3 in the conference. He took the program to the NCAA DIII Tournament for the first time ever in 2003-04 and was named the Skyline Coach of the Year for the second straight year. He would also win the award for a third time in 2016.
Tomlin’s 329 wins with SUNY Old Westbury give him the most in program history, and the coach said that being connected with his players and staff is the best part of his job.
“The thing I cherish most of all is the relationships,” he said.
