Sorting Records

Does anyone know of a good way to sort records by attribute value without the sort_management function?

I need do the following:

• Iterate through an FC, get the feature with the highest point value
• Select all of the features within 5 miles of the selected feature,
• Copy all of those selected features to a new FC
• Delete the selected from the original FC
• Continue iterating until the original FC has no features remaining.

I can manage everything except getting the feature with the highest attribute value in the FC. I only have a Basic license so I can't use sort management.

Any ideas?