Longtime Boston Celtics and USA Basketball athletic trainer Ed Lacerte has been diagnosed with acute monocytic leukemia.
Lacerte needs a blood stem cell transplant to beat the rare and aggressive form of blood cancer.
The NBA, Celtics, and USA Basketball have partnered with the NMDP registry to find a donor for Lacerte and others.
As Ed Lacerte started to fight for his life, the calls and messages flooded in.
Magic Johnson reached out. So did Paul Pierce, Isaiah Thomas, Ray Allen and Kevin McHale.
Lacerte, the athletic trainer for USA Basketball who previously worked for the Boston Celtics from 1987-2017, has spent decades patrolling the sidelines and prioritizing the health and safety of basketball players.
So, when Lacerte was diagnosed this fall with acute monocytic leukemia, those athletes let him know they’d take care of him, too.
“Every video coming in is saying how much he’s helped them, and this is their opportunity to give it back and show their love and support for him,” said Arianna Lacerte, one of Ed’s five children. “How friendly and selfless he’s been to them has just been really humbling and remarkable to see.”
To beat cancer, Lacerte needs an act of selflessness: a blood stem cell transplant. The Celtics, the NBA, USA Basketball and the National Basketball Athletic Trainers Association (NBATA) are joining forces with the NMDP blood stem cell registry to encourage people to sign up as donors.
Registering as a donor involves swabbing the inside of your cheeks, a process that takes just 20 seconds – four seconds fewer than an NBA shot clock.
At a Dec. 15 game against the Pistons, the Celtics warmed up in shooting shirts with Lacerte’s name on the back. The front of the shirts read, “20 seconds could save a life.”
More NBA teams are planning to wear the shooting shirts later this season, and the NBATA distributed pins in Lacerte’s honor to athletic training staffs around the league.
The Celtics held registration drives during three home games at TD Garden in December in addition to more at the team office and practice facility. The Indiana Pacers will host a registration drive at their Jan. 31 home game. The NBA league office is hosting one at its corporate headquarters in New York.
Jamie Margolis, NMDP’s senior vice president of member, donor and product operations, said the nonprofit is seeking donors who are “young, diverse and committed.” They look for donors aged 18-35 and, because matches are based on genetics, registering people from a variety of ethnic backgrounds is important.
Lacerte is one of the 18,000 Americans every year who are diagnosed with life-threatening blood cancers or disorders, many of which can only be cured by a stem cell or bone marrow transplant. That’s why the NBA’s platform is vital to spread awareness.
“Ed’s story is a really unique opportunity because when we talk about adding members to the registry, it is that young, diverse, committed individual we want on the registry. That’s the NBA audience, right?” Margolis said. “The greater good here is massive.”
From the Dream Team to the Celtics: Ed Lacerte’s legacy
The first signs that something was wrong didn’t appear until November.
At the beginning of the month, Ed Lacerte was in New York City to watch his son Devin run the NYC Marathon. Lacerte was also in the middle of planning multiple international trips for his job with USA Basketball.
Shortly after that weekend, his health spiraled. On Nov. 21, Lacerte was officially diagnosed with acute monocytic leukemia, a rare and aggressive form of blood cancer.
The diagnosis was serious enough that Arianna Lacerte, Ed’s daughter, moved up her wedding. Josh Corbeil, the Indiana Pacers head athletic trainer who is Ed’s close friend and mentee, flew into Boston that week to see him.
‘It was just stunning to kind of wrap our heads around it, and the first question was, ‘What can we do? How do we fix this?” Corbeil said.
Doctors told them that the only curative option for leukemia is a stem cell transplant, which removes a patient’s compromised immune system and replaces it with a healthy one from a donor.
In Ed’s hospital room, Arianna Lacerte and Corbeil brainstormed. That led to conversations with the NBATA, the Celtics and the NBA. Soon, Arianna was in touch with NMDP and the campaign was on to find a match for Ed.
“It’s been remarkable, honestly, to see the outpouring of support from not only former players that my dad has worked with over the 30 years that he was with the Celtics, but also the extended NBATA family,” said Devin Lacerte, Ed’s son.
In addition to his status as the longest-tenured athletic trainer in Celtics history, Ed Lacerte served as athletic trainer for the U.S. Olympic gold medal-winning basketball “Dream Team” at the 1992 Olympic Games in Barcelona. He also worked the 1984 Olympics, three U.S. Olympic Sports Festivals, the 1994 World Cup, two Olympic Gymnastic Trials, and three NBA All-Star Games.
Lacerte has worked for USA Basketball since 2018, working with the junior and senior national teams. He most recently served as the head athletic trainer for the February 2020 USA AmeriCup Qualifying Team.
“Growing up, I was a ball boy for the Celtics, I was a ball boy for some All-Star games,” Devin Lacerte said. “I got to do some really cool stuff because of what he did for a living, so I think I always knew in the back of my head that he was this awesome, legendary guy. But to us, it was like, I’m just going to work with dad and he happens to be working with some individuals who are really tall and really good at a particular sport, but they’re just people at the end of the day.”
Corbeil was a physical therapy graduate student at Boston University in the early 2000s when he first met Lacerte, who took him under his wing and hired Corbeil as an intern. Three years later, when Corbeil had been certified and was looking for NBA jobs, Lacerte handed him a sticky note with a phone number written beside the name ‘Larry.’
It was a number for Larry Bird, who at the time was president of basketball operations for the Pacers. Following Lacerte’s recommendation, Bird hired Corbeil to work in Indianapolis.
‘And 22 years later, here I am,’ Corbeil said. ‘So he just set the table for the rest of my life.’
Lacerte continues to mentor students and aspiring physical therapists whenever he can. He served as the NBATA’s treasurer for 29 years and was so indispensable that he remained part of the organization even after he left his job with the Celtics. The NBATA’s most prestigious award, voted on by members and given annually to a trainer who goes above and beyond in service, is named after Lacerte.
‘For years, he’s just been an ally to everybody in the profession and it’s like you’re part of the family,’ Corbeil said. ‘He just would always go out of his way to help everybody, and everybody feels it. So now everybody’s trying to step up for him.’
Lacerte’s ability to connect with people helped him transition from his role with the Celtics to USA Basketball, according to Dave Weiss, NBA executive vice president of Operations & Administration. Weiss, who oversees the league’s health programs and who first met Lacerte more than 10 years ago, said Lacerte is a natural leader who imbues his expertise with a dry sense of humor.
“The field of medicine and sport science and sport performance has evolved and he’s evolved with it, which has been great to see,” Weiss said. “The way he can walk in a room and immediately command the respect of players and their families and the coaching staff, I think that’s the thing that encapsulates him the most.”
Lacerte is that way with his family, too, albeit with a slightly softer side. He’s adored by his grandchildren, who call him “Grandpa Beach” for his love of the seaside. His kids know he will always go above and beyond to help them.
“Early days into dating my now husband, my dad was trying to do a Herculean effort of a favor for us,” Arianna Lacerte recalled. “We were like, ‘We can do that,” and he was like, ‘No, no, you can never do enough for family.’”
Finding a stem cell match and how to donate
The NMDP registry contains more than 9 million donors in the United States and more than 40 million globally. To match blood stem cell donors with patients, doctors look for similarities between unique cell proteins called human leukocyte antigens (HLA). Lacerte’s HLA typing is somewhat rare, which makes finding a match more difficult.
The donation process is typically non-invasive. In 90% of cases, blood stem cells are donated through a blood drawing process called apheresis. The other 10% of donors have bone marrow surgically harvested from their hip. When a match is identified, regardless of the patient’s location, NMDP pays for the donor’s travel to a contribution center (sometimes in their city, sometimes elsewhere) and then transports the donation to the patient.
“Ed’s cells could come from anywhere in the world,” Margolis said. “So anytime that we can get our name out there and have people understand what it is that we do, it’s a huge opportunity for every searching patient – for Ed and for 12,000 others every year who are looking for a match.”
Weiss said the impact is a testament to the power of sports and the relationships Lacerte fostered throughout his decades-long career.
“He’s someone who has built four families,” Weiss said. “He has his family, and then of course he’s part of the NBA family, part of the Celtics family and the USA Basketball family. I think that the threads from the time he was with the Celtics, just how long he was with them and what those teams meant to the league is obviously impactful. … That expertise, that leadership and the way he works with people, just a really high-character person that has been recognized over and over in all these different areas.”
A wall of Celtics memorabilia including a Larry Bird jersey and a Shaquille O’Neal sneaker provided the backdrop of a video call that Arianna and Devin Lacerte joined from inside their childhood home in Westford, Mass.
While his family gathered in his home to celebrate the holidays, Ed Lacerte spent Christmas at Massachusetts General Hospital, where he is receiving chemotherapy. Once treatment is finished, he will be eligible to receive a blood stem cell transplant whenever a match is found.
“Ideally we find a match for my dad,” Arianna Lacerte said, “but I think a legacy that he’d be so proud of, in addition to his incredible career, is the ability to help save so many others’ lives.”