Nick Lambros

The youngest of Harry (opens in a new tab) and Mary’s children. “I grew up on Main Street,” he said. “As they say, the entire village brought me up.” He learned his sports in pick-up games in the city parks (“No umpires, no parents, just kids playing by their own rules”) and, from the age of ten, by sneaking into church, school and college gyms to play basketball.

At Oneonta High he made the league all-star team as a junior and captained the 1954–55 champions. His coach remembered him sprinting down Academy Street after the team bus, which waited for no one. A basketball scholarship took him to Hartwick College, where he started for four years in both basketball and baseball, and then to a tryout with the Los Angeles Dodgers among more than 350 hopefuls.

In 1958, on his first trip to Greece, he sat down at a café table in Syntagma Square and fell into conversation with an old man who turned out to be his great-uncle, Pete Benekos. “You could give me a million dollars,” Pete told him, “but it wouldn’t make me happier than seeing you!”

He began teaching at Oneonta High in 1964, coached the junior varsity from 1965 and the varsity from 1968, and in his last season there won the Class B championship. In 1971 Roy Chipman brought him to Hartwick as assistant basketball coach and head baseball coach.

From 1967 he was also general manager of the Oneonta Yankees, a job offered to him on the street while he was running an errand for the Diana. He sold the ads, ran the concession stand and pitched batting practice. In his first week three boxes of hand-me-down uniforms arrived from Yankee Stadium: “Open them up—No. 7, Mickey Mantle!”

As Hartwick’s head coach from 1977 to 1998 he won 353 games and lost 191, the most wins in the program’s history, with seven 20-win seasons, seven NCAA tournament appearances and a trip to the Final Four in 1988. He was twice named national coach of the year. He also coached golf and tennis and, coming out of retirement at 65, baseball again.

He was the first person inducted into Hartwick’s Athletic Hall of Fame, in 1995, and entered the New York State Basketball Hall of Fame in 2004. On 21 February 2009, before about a thousand people, the college named its gym Lambros Arena. “Am I ever proud,” he told the crowd.

Proud of his Greek roots, he kept close ties with coaches in Greece and helped bring young Greek players to basketball camps at Hartwick and Syracuse. He won three straight city tennis titles and a club golf championship, and was the Oneonta Country Club’s longest-standing member.

Nick married Sharon Poling in 1972; they had two daughters, Maria (opens in a new tab) and Jacey (opens in a new tab). “Uncle Nicky” to a wide family and “Papou” to three grandchildren, he died at 88 of complications of pneumonia, the last of Harry (opens in a new tab) and Mary’s children. His life was celebrated on 12 October 2025 in the arena that bears his name.