Congratulations to Secaucus HS Girls Basketball coach on his #700th career victory !
Girls Basketball: Secaucus vs Cresskill, Dec 22, 2025.
According to John Sterling, it takes a village to be a successful coach.
The head coach at Secaucus has been at the helm of a variety of different sports – basketball, football, softball and track – and he’s enjoyed varying levels of achievement in all of them throughout his 40-plus year career.
On Monday night, he reached a significant milestone after Secaucus defeated Cresskill 69-58 in an NJIC Meadowlands Division matchup – his 700th career win.
“You get to win totals like that it’s really more that I’ve been doing it a long time than anything else,” Sterling said. “And I don’t think about it, I think my assistants they bring it up more than I do because it’s not about me, it’s always about the team. I coach those victories but the players are the ones that get all the credit, the ones that went out on the floor and did the job. It’s really their wins, I just manage them.”
Sterling, who has been coaching girls basketball for 34 years, has been head coach for the Patriots for 19 years and is now ninth in the state in career victories. During his tenure, the Patriots won the Hudson County Tournament in 2014 and 2017 and advanced to a sectional final six times. In 2023 they won their first North 2, Group 2 title, advanced to the Group 2 final and set a school record with 29 wins.
“It’s really an entire group of people. It’s the Secaucus recreation department building up the kids before they get to the high school, it’s all the fabulous assistant coaches I have,” Sterling said of assistant coach Jill Marino and volunteer assistants Jay Mahoney, Bob Wolf and Mike Disimone. “I want to thank all the assistant coaches because they’re the ones who put it all together. The town, I have a great athletic director (Charles Voorhees), and great support at the school because in this day and age if you don’t have support you’re not getting anything done. It’s been a wonderful place to coach and I’m just thankful for the people that are around me really more than anything.”
Sterling, whose father was a football and track coach at Mahwah, played basketball in high school as Passaic Valley, then played for two years at the Coast Guard Academy before transferring to Moravian College. After graduating from college he began his coaching career, first coaching boys basketball at Manchester Regional then back at Passaic Valley, first as an assistant then as head coach.
From there, he switched to girls basketball when he got a teaching job at Bogota, and spent 13 years with the Buccaneers, leading them to four North 1, Group 1 championships. He then coached at Wood-Ridge for two years before landing at Secaucus.
“I was fortunate to have my dad here and then a lot of very good coaches who kind of influenced me,” Sterling said. “I saw that my dad enjoyed teaching, he was an English teacher but that wasn’t my strength, I was better at math. Became a mathematics teacher and then coached a few different sports, basketball more than anything, but I coached football for about 30 years and coached softball for 15 or 20 years, and girls track for about five years too.”
Sterling, who won a North 1, Group 4 title as an assistant football coach at Old Tappan in 2017, just loves to coach, no matter the sport.
“It’s a wonderful experience working with young kids who are enthusiastic,” Sterling said. “I say to them all the time, it’s not like school where you have to be there. You’re choosing to be here and to be around kids who want to put that much energy and effort into something that they don’t have to do, but they enjoy doing, is very rewarding as a coach.”
On Monday night, Secaucus jumped out to a dominating 21-4 first quarter lead and led 41-24 at the half. At the start of the fourth quarter, Cresskill trailed 55-44 but opened on a 9-5 run and cut the Patriots’ lead to 11, 60-49, with 3:13 remaining.
In the final 3:01 Secaucus outscored Cresskill 9-6 for the 69-58 final.
“He works very hard for us and we appreciate him,” said Secaucus’s Gianna Torrillo, who has played for Sterling for four years. “I think that he’s made me a player on the court, but also a better person off the court.”
After Monday night’s win, Secaucus is off to a 3-1 start and is 1-0 in the Meadowlands Division. The Patriots have a tough schedule coming up as they will play in the Pascack Valley Holiday Tournament before facing the division opponents Eastern Christian, Elmwood Park and Hasbrouck Heights and Garfield in a four-game stretch.
While Sterling has his sights set on the future and the games ahead this season for Secaucus, it’s the past times that he’s had all of his former players that keeps him going.
“I think back, the great times that I’ve had with so many of the players I coached in all the sports, and a lot of them keep in touch with me and reach out,” he said. “Former players email me or meet me at games and come back and watch, and you start talking to them and it’s like you were with them practicing like yesterday instead of 30 years ago or 40 years ago or 15 years ago. I love the fact that all the time the kids bring up stories about all the things that happened, either in practice or in games, so those are great memories for their lifetime. It’s very rewarding to hear them talk proudly about their time in the program and what they accomplished and how that helped them go on to very successful lives in their careers and their businesses.”
