Cipora Herman blazed an uncommon trail in becoming the first female chief financial officer in 49ers history — zooming through the technology world, from Hewlett-Packard to Yahoo to Facebook, before tackling the daunting task of financing Levi’s Stadium.

And her journey, in a curious way, traces to Hall of Fame basketball player Larry Bird.

Herman grew up in New York, watching sports to connect with her dad, Martin Sternlicht. She showed an independent streak by rooting for the rivals of his teams: He liked the Mets so she chose the Yankees, and she became a Celtics fan because he followed the Knicks.

The first basketball game she attended, at age 7, was Knicks-Celtics at Madison Square Garden, featuring a young Larry Bird. Herman soon latched onto him as her favorite player — Bird was a dynamic star and his name was easy for a kid to remember.

This eventually led Herman to use him as the premise for one of her essays in applying to Stanford. Bird played small forward, not typically a spot for leaders, but Herman found deeper meaning in the way he controlled the action on those great Boston teams of the 1980s.

“I wrote about how leadership doesn’t have to come from a defined position — leadership comes from who you are,” Herman said. “That was the gist of the essay, which I saved and recycled in large part when I applied to business school at Stanford.

“So Larry had a huge impact on me. I’m in debt to him for a very long time.”

Now, at 40, she’s far removed from those childhood days of bravely wearing a green, puffy Celtics jacket around New York. But this lifelong passion for sports helps explain why Herman veered from her technology-company path and joined the 49ers two years ago.

She blended her interests and expertise in helping lead the effort to arrange permanent financing for Levi’s Stadium, the team’s new $1.3 billion home in Santa Clara. Herman also offers a fresh voice in NFL circles, as teams try to use new technology to improve their business operations.

Her style is a mix of patience and feistiness. Vlado Herman, her husband, described the way she calmly listens to 49ers fans, in social settings, vent about stadium issues (usually parking and food). She defuses any tension by hearing them out and offering assurances the team is working on the problem.

At the same time, he leaned on her as the “bad cop” in dealing with contractors during a recent renovation of their Los Gatos home.

“She’s tough as nails,” Vlado said.

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Herman played volleyball, basketball and softball in high school, but she knew her athletic future was limited at 5-foot-3.

She found academic and career motivation in her mom, Regina Sternlicht. Herman’s dad worked in software sales and her mom, after years as an art teacher, returned to school and studied computer science. She retired this past summer as director of information technology for one of New York City’s largest hospital organizations.

Herman’s mom also made it seem perfectly natural to balance her demanding career with household responsibilities.

“I think I was always inspired by my mom but pushed by my dad,” Herman said.

She chose Stanford over Yale, mostly to assert her independence (as if rooting for the Celtics weren’t enough). Herman majored in international relations, essentially a combination of economics and political science, and envisioned working for the World Bank after earning a master’s degree and MBA (also at Stanford).

Instead, she landed her first job at nearby Hewlett-Packard as a currency trader in the international treasury group. Herman didn’t seek a career in technology, but her understanding of the math behind interest rates and exchange rates sparked a 16-year run on the finance side of several high-tech heavyweights.

One of her first bosses at HP was Cathie Lesjak, now the company’s CFO. She became a mentor to Herman, and an example of how to prosper as a woman in finance.

“She was very smart,” Lesjak said. “Cipora didn’t define her job with hard walls around it. She did more than what was required. … She spoke up — not in your face in a bad way, but she’s willing to put herself out there. That’s what makes her stand out.”

Later, at Yahoo, Herman worked for a finance executive named Gideon Yu. That relationship changed the course of her career, partly because they clicked and partly because Yu made sure, in Herman’s words, to give her “credit and exposure” for what she accomplished.

Herman followed Yu to Facebook and eventually to the 49ers, where he served as team president from February 2012 to January 2014. He saw in her a distinctive mix of numbers-crunching intelligence and people skills.

“Cipora can forge relationships and speak the right language to the right person,” said Yu, who still owns a small piece of the 49ers but is no longer involved in day-to-day operations. “She’s not a financial person who always shoves numbers in your face.”

The timing of Herman’s move from Facebook to the 49ers, in October 2012, was logical in several respects. She knew the 49ers were preparing to launch their tech-savvy stadium, and she was intrigued by other businesses the team was starting (including a restaurant inside the stadium).

Also, five months earlier in May ’12, she was heavily involved in Facebook’s messy initial public offering; the stock was overpriced and Nasdaq technical issues compounded the trouble. (The stock, in fairness, has nearly doubled in value since its original $38 price.) Herman, the company’s treasurer and vice president of finance at the time, was one of several Facebook executives to leave in the aftermath of the IPO, probably with handsome profits from the company going public.

She said she was “a little burned out” at Facebook and insisted the IPO problems weren’t a factor in her departure to the strange, new realm of professional sports.

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As recently as 20-25 years ago, the NFL didn’t really know how to react to a high-ranking female executive.

Amy Trask, then a rising star in the Raiders’ front office, accompanied club owner Al Davis to league meetings in the early 1990s. It was the first time a woman attended an owners’ meeting, and Trask needed no sixth sense to recognize her presence bothered several owners (who went dead silent when she sat down). She later spent more than 15 years as the team’s chief executive officer.

Men still dominate the upper levels of the NFL in 2014, but Herman’s position with the 49ers highlights a significant female presence. She’s one of six female CFOs in the league, and numerous other women hold titles of vice president or above. The 49ers’ director of legal affairs is Hannah Gordon, a onetime Raiders intern.

Even so, Herman was skeptical when she interviewed with CEO Jed York. She knew the strength of matriarchs in the family, as she put it — Denise DeBartolo York, Jed’s mom, is the team’s co-chair — but she still needed persuading.

“I told Jed the one concern I have is what it’s like to be a senior woman in this organization,” Herman said. “He walked me through how he thinks about it, and the way he presented it has played out. I’ve never felt like it’s been an obstacle.”

It’s still natural to wonder if Herman was uncomfortable amid the domestic abuse furor to engulf the NFL earlier this season. The 49ers found themselves at the center of the storm, after defensive tackle Ray McDonald was arrested Aug. 31 on suspicion of felony domestic violence.

Club officials let McDonald play while San Jose police conducted their investigation, a decision sparking widespread criticism. The Santa Clara County district attorney’s office, citing insufficient evidence, announced Monday that it would not press charges against McDonald.

As for the decision to allow McDonald to play during the investigation, Herman said, “I know everything the York family does and says comes from the heart and their core values. So I trust how they’re leading our franchise through this period of time.”

More than her gender, Herman discovered challenges the past two years in her status as an NFL outsider. She didn’t work in the league during the 2011 lockout, for example, so she doesn’t have the “battle scars” of other CFOs. This added to her learning curve upon joining the 49ers.

Even so, Herman found most colleagues around the NFL view her Silicon Valley background as refreshing. She serves on the league’s Club Technology Advisory Board, comprised of six to eight senior-level executives charged with aligning technology and business objectives among the 32 teams.

This illustrates why more teams, and the league itself, are hiring people such as Herman from other industries.

“The reason for that, in my view, is the magnitude of these businesses,” said Trask, now a commentator on the CBS Sports Network. “You’re talking about entities worth more than $1 billion in some cases. That wasn’t the case 30 years ago.”

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Levi’s is the first NFL stadium built in California since the 1960s. Given this history, and the complexities of such a huge project, plenty of people doubted the 49ers’ ability to complete the financing and open the stadium on time.

But they did.

Yu arranged the construction financing and Herman (and Yu) spearheaded the permanent financing, covering $850 million (not counting $200 million in NFL financing). She leaned on her experience at Yahoo and Facebook among other stops, working with bankers and capital markets, to help the Stadium Funding Trust issue 26-year bonds and other loans stretching five and 10 years.

The project still raised concern among some Santa Clara residents. Deborah Bress, a member of the grassroots group opposing city subsidizing of the stadium, told The Chronicle in August that “this is not a good deal for Santa Clara,” and predicted the stadium will cut into the city’s general fund.

Herman disputed this, saying, “The entire structure put together was done with a keen eye to protecting the city’s general fund.”

Beyond this piece of her job, Herman has made an impact on the way the 49ers do business. York, the CEO, called her “instrumental” in making sure the stadium was financed appropriately, and he praised her technology background as especially helpful on a daily basis.

“It’s just taking more of a Silicon Valley attitude and bringing it to sports — that definitely changed the dynamic of our team,” York said. “We’re much more analytical now because of Cipora. … She made her mark very quickly. If you can deliver, the other things don’t really matter, whether you’re male or female or your ethnicity.”

Herman’s job clearly resonates with her husband, who grew up in San Jose as a 49ers fan. They met through a mutual friend and have been married 12 years; Vlado Herman, formerly chief financial officer at Yelp, now holds the same position at GitHub, a San Francisco software company.

Their kids, 8-year-old Sarah and 6-year-old David, also get a kick out of mom’s gig, often attending games with their parents. David even sat still on the couch long enough to watch one road game on television with Cipora.

“I’m finally cool to my son,” she said, chuckling, “and I think it can last a while.”

Ron Kroichick is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. E-mail: rkroichick@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @ronkroichick