Sonoma County local living the dream as Thunder beat writer

Less than a year out of college, Rancho Cotate graduate Anthony Slater landed a job most aspiring young sports writers can only dream of.

He’s traveling with and reporting on one of the NBA’s Western Conference title contenders. (And it’s not the Warriors.)

In 2013, Slater, a 23-year-old blogger and web editor for Oklahoma’s largest daily newspaper, slid into a job covering the playoff-bound NBA Thunder when the paper’s secondary basketball beat reporter left for another job.

Just two years later, the No. 1 Thunder beat writer left. Bingo, Slater took another step up.

Now, the just-turned-26 North Bay native is the primary reporter covering the Thunder as they attempt to dethrone defending champ Golden State.

Slater, a 2008 Rancho grad, is having the time of his life.

“It was crazy,” he admits. “I was 23 and covering this major NBA team.”

In contrast, most newly graduated journalists start out at weekly newspapers or small-town dailies, covering crime, eye-glazing planning meetings or the latest ribbon-cutting. They often toil for years and work their way up the ranks, sometimes skipping around the country in seek of a better job.

Slater instead is living the dream, essentially coworkers with basketball superstars Kevin Durant and Russell Westbrook, traveling around the country getting paid to watch basketball games.

“I know I was lucky, with my parents, my upbringing, even with the other guy leaving his job,” he said recently by telephone after flying back to Oklahoma City after covering both Games 1 and 2 at Oracle Arena in Oakland last week.

“I was looking around. I didn’t think I was going to be in Oklahoma much longer,” he said. “Then this job opened up and that kept me here.”

Slater’s swift ascension to covering a major pro sports franchise started shortly after his high school sporting days ended at Rancho Cotate, where he played baseball and basketball for the Cougars.

And some of it may be in his genes. His father, Ray Slater, is a novelist.

Because of his love for sports, he started contributing to Bleacher Report, which was a new web sports forum at the time.

“Now it’s super famous. But back then, just any fan could go on and write what they wanted,” he said. “I started to do that for some of my favorite teams or random sports teams.”

Slater also began writing for the Sonoma State University Star, the school paper, covering Seawolves baseball and basketball. His brother, Joe, played baseball for SSU that year.

Still, he was just having fun, dabbling in writing.

“I never, ever dreamed that would be a job at all,” he said.

“That was the year my brother was pretty good at baseball, so I wrote a little about the team, but mainly basketball,” Slater said. “I thought, ‘This is cool, I like writing about sports.’ But Sonoma State didn’t have football and I wanted to cover big sports, and I wanted to get out of California.”

So, starting where we all do these days, he Googled “sports media programs” to find out which universities might have programs he could major in.

He was accepted to Penn State, Oklahoma State and Bradley.

“I’d never stepped foot in Oklahoma before,” he said.

He moved to Stillwater in 2010 and two days later was in class working toward his sports journalism-sports media degree.

Slater muses that if he had gone to Penn State, at a time when the Jerry Sandusky molestation scandal was emerging and the exalted football coach Joe Paterno was forced out, his career direction may have taken a more newsy turn.

Instead, he began covering the Oklahoma State football team for the school paper.

His first story was on Justin Blackmon, who at the time was an “up and comer who could have a breakout year,” the editor said.

Indeed. Slater chronicled Blackmon’s All-American season: He was named the 2010 Big 12 offensive player of the year, the first receiver to earn the honor, and was named the country’s top receiver. He went on to play in the NFL.

The following year, Oklahoma State won its first 10 games, rising as high as No. 2 in the national rankings. The Cowboys finished the regular season 11–1 and defeated the Andrew Luck-led Stanford Cardinal in the Fiesta Bowl.

The school paper sent Slater on the road to cover all the Cowboys’ games, giving him his first taste of big-time sports coverage.

“You hit a lot of luck along the way,” he said. “That team could have had a bad year and I wouldn’t have gotten all the experience.”

A few months after Slater graduated in December 2012, The Oklahoman hired him full-time as its first blogger.

Since then, Slater has covered the Thunder through some touchy times - like when the paper published a headline calling OKC star Kevin Durant “Mr. Unreliable,” which sparked an uproar in Oklahoma.

And, as Golden State fans will remember from February, Stephen Curry’s 35-foot 3-pointer in the closing seconds of overtime to tie an NBA record for 3s in a game and stun the Thunder,?121-118. Curry tallied 46 points that night.

And now he’s in the midst of the uproar over Draymond Green’s kick to the crotch of the Thunder’s Steven Adams.

Slater, whose mother, Sydne Stempien, still lives in Rohnert Park, is making a name for himself as a versatile young reporter. He’s offered insight from the OKC perspective on San Francisco sports radio station KNBR.

Slater is not sure what his future holds but he’s riding out the Thunder’s successful run for now.

“I haven’t delved too much into my future plans because this season has been kind of wild,” he said. “This is the business I’ll always be in. I don’t know where it will take me.”

You can reach Lori A. Carter at 521-5470 or lori.carter@pressdemocrat.com. On Twitter @loriacarter.