Their tenures range from nearly three decades to just a few months. Some followed legends; others were asked to rebuild programs. Some were walk-ons; others were highly recruited. Some had years of coaching experience; others had none. Yet eight of Stanford’s 36 varsity head coaches share a bond that spans eras, sports, and résumés: Like the athletes they now coach, all once wore a Cardinal uniform.
Outgoing athletics director Bernard Muir, who hired six of the eight, says that while he always looks for the best coaching fit for a program, “alums do have an advantage. They understand how this place works and what it’s like to be a Stanford student-athlete. That takes time for a coach from the outside to fully grasp, especially the admissions piece.”
These alum-coaches get what it takes to get in; they can relate to the struggle of juggling high-level academics and athletics; they remember the cadence of the quarter system; they know the university like the back of their—wait, scratch that. “During my first year back, I was telling a recruit how campus worked,” recalls softball coach Jessica Allister, ’04, who was hired in 2017. “And one of my players said, ‘Uh, Coach, that’s not how it is anymore.’ ”
Campus isn’t the only thing that has evolved. All of these coaches are trying to uphold the Stanford brand of excellence in academics and athletics in a college sports landscape that is radically different from their playing days. That’s thanks in part to conference realignment, but even more to the one-two punch of name, image, and likeness (NIL) contracts and the transfer portal, which can create a money-fueled dynamic akin to professional free agency. Some star athletes are transferring elsewhere to take advantage of sizable payouts—softball pitcher NiJaree Canady, the 2024 Collegiate Player of the Year, took a $1 million NIL offer to transfer from Stanford to Texas Tech in July—while some top high schoolers are looking beyond the Farm for greener pastures. The notion that college is not a four-year decision, it’s a 40-year decision—once Stanford’s strong selling point—is no longer sufficient. “It’s sobering to learn we aren’t bulletproof, that we’re going to have to adapt and change,” says baseball coach David Esquer, ’87. In that regard, he says, maybe being an alum coach is a bit of a disadvantage. “We know what Stanford offers,” he points out. “We think, why wouldn’t you want to come here?”
In their own way, each of the eight makes a compelling case for the Stanford student-athlete experience. After all, they didn’t just go to Stanford. They came back.
A Leadership Lab
John Tanner, ’82
Women’s water polo
- Studied: Political science
- Hired: 1998
- As student-athlete: NCAA titles (1978, 1980, 1981); All-American (1982)
- As coach: NCAA titles (2002, 2011, 2012, 2014, 2015, 2017, 2019, 2022, 2023)
Women’s water polo coach John Tanner excels at producing NCAA titles—in his 27 years, his teams have won nine. But all that glory is, in a way, the byproduct of his larger mission. “As I see it, my job is to use sport as a vehicle for teaching people to be great citizen-teammates,” he says. “I see athletics as a leadership laboratory.”
His players don’t just get the chance to be national champions. They get a four-year life skills seminar. “I try to put them in positions where they get practice at things that’ll serve them well after Stanford,” says Tanner. So, along with high-pressure “Win the Day” scenarios in the pool with Stanford down one and the clock ticking, players do mock interviews and career workshops, deliver twice-a-year TED Talk–style presentations about a topic that reveals something about them to their teammates, and invite a professor to an annual team faculty dinner. Players are often in charge of travel meals, which fosters organization and empathy. “They’ll say to us, ‘Gosh, this girl never places her order on time!’ And we’re like, we know,” says assistant coach Kim Krueger, ’11. “Every piece of what we do has intention.”
Intention isn’t the word Tanner would use to characterize his time playing for the Stanford men’s team, which won three NCAA titles during his career. “I just came to the pool and worked out and liked playing,” he says. “As soon as I left here, I realized how good I’d had it being surrounded by all that excellence.” He began appreciating Stanford even more while coaching men’s water polo and swimming at the University of the Pacific, where the athletics director was a Stanford alumnus, Ted Leland, PhD ’83, who “led from a really intellectual point of view.” Leland would return to Stanford as AD in 1991 and hire Tanner in 1998. Since then, Tanner has taken an increasingly holistic, collaborative, and curiosity-based approach to coaching. “Getting to Stanford is an individual sport,” he says. “But being successful in life is a team sport. You can’t do anything without collaboration.”
Return of Tabzilla
Tabitha Yim, ’08
Women’s gymnastics
- Studied: Human biology
- Hired: 2017
- As student-athlete: 14-time All-American; Pac-10 and Regional Gymnast of the Year (2008)
- As coach: NCAA semifinals (2024); individual NCAA champion (Anna Roberts, ’26, vault, 2024)
Tabitha Yim loved being a Stanford student-athlete. (Who wouldn’t, with dormmates who gave away hot dogs and hamburgers to winners of “Tabitha trivia” at tailgates, painted their chests T-A-B-S, and unfurled a sign boasting “You Don’t Know Tabzilla!” during meets?) And the 14-time All-American loved being an assistant to Stanford women’s gymnastics coach Kristen Smyth from 2010 to 2015. But she thought establishing a nonprofit might be a better way to satisfy her passion for serving youth than head coaching. That is, until Smyth told her, “Sometimes you’re given an opportunity to do exactly what you want, but it looks different than you imagined.”
After serving as head coach at Arizona from 2015 to 2017, Yim has been doing exactly what she wants exactly where she wants. “Stanford changed my life,” says Yim. “I loved my experience, my teammates, the friendships I made with people who weren’t athletes. It’s very easy for me to sell that love to recruits.”
Senior gymnast Brenna Neault says that on top of the academic and athletic opportunities at Stanford, Yim sold her on “the random and fun bonding opportunities” that happen at a school where most undergraduates live on campus all four years. “You could have a full life at Stanford,” Neault says. “I wanted that.”
Yim’s favorite bonding memories include sharing the thrill of other Cardinal athletes’ triumphs: quarterback Tavita Pritchard, ’09, masterminding a final drive to upset USC in 2007; Brook Lopez, ’10, hitting a buzzer beater to send Stanford men’s basketball to the 2008 Sweet 16. “It was spring break and I was watching in a dorm lounge,” she recalls. “I didn’t know the other people there, but after Brook hit that shot, we were all embracing. Sports bring something to the overall student experience here that’s different than the Ivies, that’s special and important.”
Balancing Act
Paul Goldstein, ’98
Men’s tennis
- Studied: Human biology
- Hired: 2014
- As student-athlete: NCAA team titles (1995, 1996, 1997, 1998); four-time All-American; Pac-10 Player of the Year (1998)
- As coach: Pac-12 titles (2015, 2021, 2024)
When Paul Goldstein left his job in clean-energy sales to take over as men’s tennis coach in 2014, he was looking forward, he says, to being back on the campus where he had spent “the best years of my life.” But his former coach, Dick Gould, ’59, MA ’60, warned him it would be a different ride than in 1995–98, when Goldstein led Stanford to four straight NCAA titles while earning All-America honors each year. “Coach told me, ‘Paul, you don’t get it. Your four years were the easiest in my 38. You guys all got along; we won. It was Camelot,’ ” recalls Goldstein, who spent 10 years playing professionally but had never coached. “And I was like, how hard could it be? But he was right.”
One challenge: chasing a championship. Since Gould led Stanford to its 17th NCAA title in 2000, there hasn’t been an 18th. “College tennis is way more competitive than when I was a student,” says Goldstein. “It used to be Stanford would get the best American players and only Americans were playing college tennis. Now it’s very international, and other programs are devoting more resources to the sport. But our goal is always to get back into contention, and we’ve done a pretty decent job of that.”
Another: Supporting young people who are going through a transformational phase and maybe experiencing failure—in sports, academics, social life—for the first time. “I want them to enjoy their time at Stanford like I did, to have healthy social lives and relationships,” says Goldstein. “And I want us to succeed on the tennis court. It’s a tough balance.”
Goldstein does what he can to help his players manage the competing demands. “To accommodate my schedule, he’d play with me at 7 a.m.,” says Tom Fawcett, ’18. “I’d go by the courts at 7 p.m. and he was still there. He was willing to do anything for us, and that made us want to work really hard for him.”
Despite the challenges and long hours, Goldstein wouldn’t trade in this gig. “Working at Bloom Energy felt like what I did for a living,” he says. “This feels like who I am.”
On Brotherhood
David Esquer, ’87, MA ’89
Baseball
- Studied: Economics; sociology (MA)
- Hired: 2017
- As student-athlete: NCAA title, College World Series all-tournament team (1987)
- As coach: Pac-12 titles (2018, 2022, 2023); College World Series (2021, 2022, 2023)
David Esquer doesn’t wear his Stanford student-athlete experience lightly. “The fact that he went to Stanford is one of the most important things about who he is,” says former Cardinal first baseman Carter Graham, ’24. “He talks about what it means to be a Stanford man—leaving everything better than you found it and being a leader who is not above anything. And if you can’t find a way, you make one. He is that guy that he preaches every day.”
A walk-on from Salinas, Calif., Esquer never earned a scholarship, but by his senior year, he was the starting shortstop on the team that would win Stanford’s first NCAA baseball title. Between seasons in the minors, he worked toward his graduate degree while helping out coach Mark Marquess, ’69. “I had never considered coaching as a profession,” says Esquer. “I thought I’d be an investment banker.” But when Marquess offered him an assistant position in 1991, he took the leap. “I loved it,” he says. After stints at Stanford and Pepperdine, he spent 18 years as head coach at Cal, where he was named National Coach of the Year in 2011.
Back on the campus he calls home since 2017, Esquer coaches players who are bigger, stronger, and faster than players of his day, but also somewhat less creative and more risk averse. “I think they’re better at the skill of baseball,” Esquer says. “I think the instinct for baseball is a little bit lower. You have to compete, and there’s someone else who’s trying really hard to get you to fail.” His players seem to be developing those competitive instincts: The Cardinal made three straight College World Series appearances from 2021 to 2023.
Another NCAA title would be great, Esquer says, but nurturing team connection is at least as important. “I want to give my players the same experience that I had, in that I got to play with my best friends,” he says. “Everyone who has ever played baseball here is related through a brotherhood.”
The Rebuilder
Jessica Allister, ’04
Softball
- Studied: Economics
- Hired: 2017
- As student-athlete: College World Series (2001, 2004)
- As coach: College World Series (2023, 2024)
When Jessica Allister agreed to take over Stanford’s softball program after seven years spent remodeling the once lowly University of Minnesota into a team that went 56-5 in her final year, she had mixed feelings. “I was thrilled to represent a university I care deeply about—and upset with the state of the program,” she says. “I’d seen what winning in college softball looked like. And the Stanford program was incredibly far behind.”
Before signing, she extracted commitments from Muir to invest in assistant coaches, operations, training staffs, and facilities. With that investment, Allister has transformed a program that had won just four Pac-12 games in the three seasons before she arrived in 2017 into a national title contender. In 2023, Stanford went to the Women’s College World Series for the first time since her playing days, when, as a four-year starter at catcher, she helped lead the Cardinal to WCWS appearances in 2001 and 2004. Her 2024 team became the first in school history to make the WCWS two years in a row.
She says her success is due in part to the influence of her Stanford coach, John Rittman, who “encouraged women to dream bigger and just go for it,” she says. “Also, I don’t believe that the best team today is going to be the best team tomorrow. I think you’ve got to get out and get to work. I like a challenge. I like a puzzle. And I’m incredibly competitive.”
Even with the frustrating loss of Canady to Texas Tech, Allister is optimistic about this year’s puzzle. “While we have young pitching, we have a top nine offensively that’s going to be as good as any group I’ve had as a coach,” she says. “We’ll be able to contend with anybody at the end of the year. With every departure there’s opportunity, and I’m excited for the young women in our program who will get that opportunity.”
Great Expectations
Conrad Ray, ’97
Men’s golf
- Studied: Public policy
- Hired: 2004
- As student-athlete: NCAA team title (1994); All-Pac-10 (1997)
- As coach: NCAA team titles (2007, 2019); NCAA individual title (Cameron Wilson, ’14, 2014); Division I Coach of the Year (2007, 2019)
Conrad Ray was a touring golf pro living in Hilton Head, S.C., when he got a call from Stanford one day in 2004. The men’s golf program was searching for a new coach, and Ray’s name had been floated by former teammates Tiger Woods, ’98, Casey Martin, ’94, and Notah Begay, ’94. “I thought maybe the guys were telling me, ‘Time to get a day job, Conrad,’ ” he says.
Somewhat to his surprise—he’d never coached—Ray got that day job. “I didn’t know what I was really doing,” he says. “But as someone who had played here, I had some of the necessary skills baked in—performing under pressure, being a leader, managing chaos. I had played a lot and been around some great players, and I knew how you went about getting better as a pro. And that’s how we crafted our practices.” In Ray’s third year, 2007, the Cardinal won its first NCAA title since 1994, the year Ray walked on to the team as a freshman.
While he says his coach, Wally Goodwin, would recruit great players and more or less stay out of the way, Ray runs a structured week and emphasizes player development. Strength training, once considered ruinous to swings, is now so vital that the program just hired a full-time strength and conditioning coach. Swing coaching is now augmented by high-tech launch monitors—Ray calls them “the MRIs of golf”—that can capture dozens of data parameters about club delivery, ball launch, and flight. They can also produce some funky-looking swings, he says, “but if the impact position is correct, no one cares.”
Some things haven’t changed. Ray still emphasizes the team over the individual, and he still embraces the advice Goodwin offered in 2004: In recruiting, always defer to quality people who really appreciate Stanford. “Most schools are telling athletes how their life is going to be easier,” says Ray. “We’re telling kids life’s going to be harder because they’ll have expectations to get good grades and be a first-team All-American in golf. They are going to miss a lot of school. If a kid perks up and says, ‘Hey, that’s what I want!’ then you know that’s a kid that’s probably going to do pretty well here.”
The Butt-Kicker
Alex Massialas, ’16
Fencing
- Studied: Mechanical engineering
- Hired: 2024
- As student-athlete: NCAA titles (men’s foil, 2013, 2015); four-time All-American
- As coach: Upset top-ranked Harvard in first match
When longtime fencing coaches Lisa Posthumus and George Pogosov retired in May 2024, former Cardinal fencing star Alex Massialas was happy to help Stanford identify the best candidate to replace them. Pretty quickly, he realized he was that candidate.
No one could touch his fencing credentials: As a freshman in 2013, he had become the youngest NCAA champion in men’s foil (he won again in 2015), and at the 2016 Rio Olympics, he became the first American male fencer to win two medals since 1904. He had assisted at his dad’s San Francisco fencing club since he was 15. And he wasn’t likely to get poached by another program. “If this was any other school,” he says, “I wouldn’t have been interested.”
While he says it is “a little surreal” sitting behind the coach’s desk, coaching is not his only pursuit; he remains a competitive athlete whose goal is to make his fifth Olympics in L.A. in 2028. “I think that’s one of my greatest selling points: ‘You come work with me as your coach, and I can fence with you,’ ” he says. “Ask my fencers—I still kick their butts!” (We did; he does.)
He has added more structure and accountability to practices. If anyone is late, everyone has to run line drills. “I want camaraderie; I want teamwork,” Massialas says. “Without that cohesive, collaborative environment, there’s no way to get better.”
In Massialas’s first meet as coach in November, Stanford upset top-ranked Harvard to raucous cheering from the Cardinal sidelines. “We are making strides in our fencing, and getting closer as a team,” says men’s foil captain Sanjay Kasi, ’26. “That was the most fun I’ve ever had as a teammate.”
Keeping It in the Family
Kate Paye, ’95, JD/MBA ’03
Women’s basketball
- Studied: Political science
- Hired: 2024 (as head coach)
- As student-athlete: NCAA title (1992)
- As coach: NCAA title (2021, as associate head coach); Division I Assistant Coach of the Year (2022, 2024)
Kate Paye has been waiting 17 years to take her turn running the Stanford women’s basketball team. But she is in no hurry to put her own stamp on the program that Tara VanDerveer built into a national power over 38 years before retiring last spring. There are too many other things demanding her attention: the recruiting and player-retention turbulence created by NIL and the portal; a new conference and travel schedule; and a young team so lightly regarded that Stanford began the season unranked for the first time in 25 years. “It’s not so much about me and what I want to do, but what we need to be doing,” says Paye. “How do we need to adapt? What do we need to improve? Understanding Stanford doesn’t make anything easy, but it certainly helps.”
Few know Stanford better. Paye was born at Stanford Hospital into a Stanford family (both her parents and her two siblings are alums), attended VanDerveer’s camps as a kid, and walked on to the Cardinal, eventually earning a scholarship and the starting point guard job. After playing a few seasons of pro ball and earning a JD/MBA (at Stanford, of course), she briefly tried her hand at law before finding herself back on the bench, as an assistant—at San Diego State, Pepperdine, and Stanford—and, eventually, in 2016, as VanDerveer’s associate head coach.
While Paye carries over much of what has made the women’s basketball program successful—including the staff, a habit of intensive preparation, and a culture of unselfishness and sisterhood in which older players mentor younger ones—she is no VanDerveer clone. “Just look at her office,” says VanDerveer. “It’s meticulous. Mine’s a mess.” Paye is also “more intense and fiery than Tara,” according to senior Brooke Demetre. And as famously adaptable to changing rules and circumstances as VanDerveer was, Paye will have to be far more so. One strategy is clear to her: “I feel we need to double down on who we are at Stanford, and narrow our focus even more to identify the high school student-athletes who understand what a Stanford education means and have a family that gets it too,” she says. She has some idea what that looks like.
Kelli Anderson, ’84, is a writer in Sonoma, Calif. Email her at stanford.magazine@stanford.edu.
Photos from the top: Richard Ersted/isiphotos.com; Karen Hickey/isiphotos.com; Lyndsay Radnedge/isiphotos.com; Bob Drebin/isiphotos.com (2); Supriya Limaye/isiphotos.com; Dave Bernal/isiphotos.com; Stanford Athletics
