The Legend

When word got out in the spring of 1985 that Tara VanDerveer was in the running to become the next coach of Stanford women’s basketball, Erica “Riki” Mueser Sorenson remembers the team being surprised. They knew VanDerveer well. She was the head coach at Ohio State, which had crushed them by 32 points that December en route to a 28–3 season and a third consecutive Big 10 title. The mystery was why she would consider Stanford. The Cardinal had lost three times as many games as it had won over the previous two years, culminating in 11 straight defeats. Ohio State had just set an attendance record in front of 22,157 fans. Stanford didn’t even pull out all the bleachers for home games. “We were like, yeah, no way she’s going to come here after the success she’s had at Ohio State,” says Sorenson, ’87, then a sophomore guard.

They weren’t alone. VanDerveer’s friends—and father—didn’t think she should look twice at Stanford. But VanDerveer’s entire relationship with basketball was born in defiance of expectations. She’d grown up in a time and place where girls were hardly supposed to play a sport, let alone make it their livelihood. After turning down Stanford athletic director Andy Geiger, VanDerveer reconsidered. Stanford promised better weather, excellence in education, and, comically in retrospect, a more relaxed pace, where she might find time for skiing, sailing, and enjoying the arts. And most important, as Geiger had made clear, Stanford was one of only a handful of schools to make a full financial commitment to women’s athletics. When VanDerveer accepted, her father—often a prescient man—told her mother their daughter would be unemployed and living with them in three months. It was a graveyard job, he said.

GAME TIME: VanDerveer got the team to .500 in her second season, 1986–87. Her final season (top) was the Cardinal’s last in the Pac–12. (Photos: Andrew Brodhead/Stanford University (top); Rod Searcey/ISI Photos)

Hardly. When VanDerveer retired this spring as the winningest coach in college basketball history, she thanked her parents for their love and support but served it with a gentle rib. “My father was right about one thing,” she said. “The Stanford job involved digging, but instead of a graveyard job, it has been a gold mine job.” VanDerveer’s résumé gleams with the results. She leaves coaching with 1,216 career wins, three national championships, 14 Final Fours, and a near-perennial spot atop the Pac-12. And don’t forget her year away from Stanford leading the United States women to actual gold at the 1996 Olympics. But even those highlights are part of a bigger legacy. VanDerveer’s team didn’t make this year’s NCAA finals, the first ever to outdraw the men in television ratings. But that turning point is inextricably linked to VanDerveer and a small group of other coaches, whose decades of excellence elevated women’s basketball into the national consciousness, says journalist Michelle Smith, who is writing a book about her. VanDerveer established a West Coast presence for a game that had been dominated by the South and the East Coast. And her undefeated year leading the national team restored glory to U.S. women’s basketball after it had fallen short at the previous Olympics, paving the way for the launch of professional women’s basketball in this country. VanDerveer is on a Mount Rushmore of basketball coaches, Smith says, not just for what she did for Stanford but for what she did for the game.

“She was that visionary in the same way that others in Silicon Valley, in the tech world, were,” says Sonja Henning, ’91, one of 34 Stanford alums to play in the WNBA. “She figured out how she could have the influence necessary to give us an opportunity to reach our potential when others in the room thought we should just be happy we were there.”

The Buildup

Her debut year at Stanford didn’t suggest the glory at hand. VanDerveer’s first season on the Farm stands as the only losing campaign in her 46-year career. But the team was already changing, says Sorenson, who thrived on the intensity that infused everything from defensive drills to their home summer workouts. One early “Tara-ism” was: “Mental is to physical as four is to one.” (Her players are reportedly compiling a book of such bons mots.) At one point, VanDerveer had players write out goals, and Sorenson’s was to get to a .500 winning percentage. VanDerveer was in disbelief. “She was like, ‘Wait, what? Your goal is to be .500?’ ” Sorenson says. “ ‘We are here to win a national championship.’ ” The team had been 9–19 the previous season.

It would happen in stunningly quick fashion. VanDerveer’s first recruiting class brought a pair of future Olympians to campus: Jennifer Azzi, ’90, the program’s first All-American, and Katy Steding, ’90, now a Stanford assistant coach, who pushed the team to the .500 threshold in their first year, 1986–87. The following season brought the three-point shot to college ball, and VanDerveer embraced it—Stanford attempted double the number of three-point shots compared with the national average. (Another Tara-ism: “Do the math. Three is worth more than two.”) By the fall of 1989, VanDerveer believed she had her players on the cusp. She invited Stanford women’s swimming coach Richard Quick to help push them over. Quick’s teams at UT–Austin and Stanford had won six straight NCAA titles, and, as Henning recalls, he told the players to stop thinking, Oh, wouldn’t it be nice to win a national championship, and start getting comfortable with being national champions. “The next day we came in and there’s a sign in the locker room that says, ‘Get comfortable with it. 1990 National Champions,’ ” she says. In April 1990, the team won Stanford’s first NCAA championship in women’s basketball. Two years later, they won again.

Success brought VanDerveer the Olympics gig. Typically, the coach would spend six weeks or so bringing the U.S. team together. But third-place finishes at the 1994 World Championships, 1992 Olympics, and 1991 Pan American Games had set alarms ringing. More was needed. VanDerveer had to step away from Stanford for a year to lead a dozen players against teams across the world in full-time preparation for the 1996 Atlanta Games. The team had the financial and marketing backing of the NBA, which was contemplating a women’s league and considered gold the only acceptable medal outcome. “The only person who can mess this up,” NBA commissioner David Stern told VanDerveer over lunch one day, “is you.” VanDerveer wore only red, white, and blue down to her socks for the entire year. The team went 52–0 before the Olympics and 8–0 during them, dispatching Brazil by 24 points to win gold. VanDerveer was the only female head coach in sight. “What followed that historic moment changed the game forever,” reads VanDerveer’s entry in the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame, “as the seeds for professional basketball for women began to take root.” Within the year, two U.S. professional women’s leagues would launch: the short-lived American Basketball League, which featured Azzi and Steding among its headliners, and the WNBA.

But VanDerveer knows as well as anyone how thin the line is between glory and heartbreak. Back on the Farm, she had more than a dozen teams she says were as good or better than her championship sides. She often talks about the stacked 1997 team that fell by one point in overtime to Old Dominion in the Final Four—“the hardest loss ever”—and her admiration for point guard Jamila Wideman, ’97, who rallied her tearful teammates afterward by saying, “I’d rather lose with you than win with anyone else.” It would be more than a decade before four-time All-American Candice Wiggins, ’08, would lead the Cardinal back to the Final Four in 2008, the beginning of a run of six Final Fours (including two championship games) in seven years. And yet the program’s third title remained out of reach, the breaks sometimes literally not going Stanford’s way. Another of VanDerveer’s oft-remembered moments is star center Jayne Appel, ’10, not wanting to take off her uniform after losing, in her final game, to Connecticut in the 2010 Finals. She had played with a sprained ankle and broken foot.

It would take 29 years from VanDerveer’s second title to her third in 2021, the culmination of a nomadic year bobbing, weaving, and testing through the pandemic. For nearly 10 weeks, her players lived out of duffel bags, played on the road, and practiced in a high school gym in Santa Cruz, which allowed contact sports. The final game against Arizona came down to a desperation heave by the Wildcats that seemed to hang in the air, a long season boiled down to a long second. It bounded off the back of the rim. Stanford 54: Arizona 53. VanDerveer’s reaction at the buzzer was occluded by a black mask, but her joy was on full display the next day as hundreds lined the streets at an outdoor campus parade to honor the team.

Love and Basketball

This January, VanDerveer surpassed Duke’s Mike Krzyzewski as the winningest coach in college basketball history. Thousands of fans and dozens of former players watched as confetti rained down on VanDerveer, who donned a custom jacket far more ornamented than her preferred quarter-zips. The Nike-designed piece was covered from front to back with 1,203 tally marks, one for each win. Afterward, she opened up about what it had meant to coach a sport she had barely been able to play growing up. “I’m so jealous because I never got to do what they get to do,” she said, “but I’m able to watch a little girl’s dream play out through them.”

VanDerveer fell in love with basketball doing the three-player weave in elementary school gym class in upstate New York. But for her early life, playing opportunities for girls were scant. If she saved her money and bought the best ball, she realized, she could get into boys’ pickup games. Often, though, she was left to shoot hoops in her neighbors’ driveways by herself. In junior high, she volunteered as school mascot to get close to the boys’ games but had a habit of keeping the huge bear head tucked under her arm to get a better view. (“It’s the only job from which I ever got fired,” she says.) Her gym teacher wrote, “To the best basketball player, boy or girl, in the school” in her ninth-grade yearbook, but such praise was almost cruel without a way for VanDerveer to apply her skill. It was only when her parents sent her to private school midway through high school that she got to consistently play organized ball.

IN THE MOMENT: Celebrating a basket during the second round of the 2017 national tournament. (Photo: Orlin Wagner/Associated Press)

She played her first year of college hoops at SUNY Albany, then transferred to Indiana. Before every practice, she sat silent, high in the stands, watching Indiana men’s coach Bobby Knight put his team through its paces, beginning and ending each practice with the sort of repeated patterns she would later adopt at Stanford. (“At the end of practice, we always had to make 12 free throws in a row,” says Nneka Ogwumike, ’12, a WNBA star with the Seattle Storm. “And if you didn’t, you had to run. It was just a way of life.”) In 1973, with VanDerveer the starting point guard, the Indiana women made it to nationals in Flushing, N.Y. When Indiana lost to finish fourth, VanDerveer’s mother—who had never before seen her daughter play college ball—tried to console her, saying it was only a game. “Mother,” VanDerveer replied. “It’s more than a game.”

 The limits of VanDerveer’s time on the court had been made clear when she was one of 60 women to try out for the U.S. national team in 1972. “Fifty-nine were better than I was,” she later wrote. “I think I put people on the national team just by guarding them.” After Indiana, VanDerveer intended to take a year off to travel the country and then go to law school. But she was broke and back in her parents’ basement by Christmas. Her dad spurred her into action. Her sister Marie’s newly formed high school team had just been shellacked 11–99, and he made her help. A new path emerged. She enrolled in a master’s program in sports administration at Ohio State and got a grad assistant position with the women’s basketball team, living off food stamps and driving a rusted-out Volkswagen. “She’s representative of a self-made American woman who never really got a hand up from anyone,” says Sally Jenkins, ’82, a Washington Post sports columnist. “She came out of an era when it was denigrated to be a female athlete and it was denigrated to be a female coach, and you certainly didn’t go into the profession thinking you were ever going to get rich at it.” 

By the late ’70s, Title lX, the federal law mandating equal educational opportunities for men and women, including in sports, started to slow the headwind. In 1978, VanDerveer took over as head coach at the University of Idaho. The team had been 2–18 the year before her arrival. They would be 26–5 after her second season. Early in her Idaho tenure, the local newspaper wrote a preseason profile on the men’s team. VanDerveer called to ask for equal space for the women. At one game, a radio guy warned her that the men’s game started right after theirs. If the score was tied after regulation, they’d need to settle things in sudden death rather than by playing a full overtime period. “And I said, ‘If anyone comes on the court, there will be sudden death,’ ” VanDerveer told ESPN in 2021. “But I will be killing them.”

In 2021, she was one of the fiercest voices when news spread that players at the men’s NCAA tournament had amenities far superior to the women’s, including better food, training facilities, and COVID testing. “Women athletes and coaches are done waiting, not just for upgrades of a weight room but for equity in every facet of life,” she said in a blistering statement that pushed the NCAA into an investigation of itself. Such advocacy is part of why her stature extends well beyond the court. In 2022, after chemistry professor Carolyn Bertozzi won the Nobel Prize, she was introduced at a Stanford football game, as is tradition. But as the Farm’s first female Nobel laureate, Bertozzi wanted to do something at women’s events, which is how she arrived in VanDerveer’s locker room during a game versus Arizona State. A lifelong basketball fan, Bertozzi admired VanDerveer’s coaching, but she also saw her as a champion for overcoming the kind of sexism that she had faced as a young scientist unable to get a job in an organic chemistry lab. “When you went into chemistry labs, it was all guys,” Bertozzi says. “It was very much like a locker room.” Meeting VanDerveer, she says, ranks as one of the biggest perks of winning the Nobel. “I was nervous,” she says. “She’s a hero.”

Strategy First

VanDerveer is not the cuddliest personality, nor the most extroverted presence, nor even the most astute talent scout, but she has surrounded herself with coaches who fill those gaps. “Be sure they complement you more than compliment you,” she told the New York Times earlier this year. Perhaps her most distinguished role within the coaching ranks has been that of the professor, says Smith, the journalist writing a book about her. VanDerveer is a master tactician, strategist, and educator, as aware of her opponent’s strengths and weaknesses as her own. “Some folks will say, ‘Look, we’re going to match our best stuff with their best stuff, and let’s see if we win,’ ” Smith says. “And Tara is like, ‘You’re not going to have your best stuff. I’m taking your best player out of the game.’ ” Trisha Stevens Lamb, ’91, a star on the 1990 championship team, remembers VanDerveer liking another team’s in-bounds play so much, she drew it up at halftime and started using it during the same game. The late Pat Summitt, the longtime coach of the University of Tennessee and the winningest coach in college basketball when she retired in 2012, used to relish her annual battles with VanDerveer. “Pat said the same thing to me every year: ‘Tara’s going to absolutely pick us apart,’ ” says Jenkins, who co-authored three books with Summitt. “Pat loved playing that game because it was such a great diagnostic. She knew Tara was going to expose every weakness.”

VanDerveer’s savvy isn’t just her own grasp of X’s and O’s, says former Stanford star Vanessa Nygaard, ’97, who was recently head coach of WNBA team Phoenix Mercury. It’s that she can share that vision with young players in ways they can quickly understand and act on as a unit. “One of the things that makes her great is her ability, her complete understanding, that allows her to explain things simply,” Nygaard says. “That is so hard to do as a coach or really in any job. Even when I was with Phoenix, I was calling her: ‘Hey, what do you think I should do in this situation?’ ”

GIVE ME 20: VanDerveer pays her dues after her players beat her defense during a 2008 practice at nationals. Photo: Elaine Thompson/Associated Press

She never lost her edge. Stanford won the Pac-12 regular season in 2024 for the 26th time under VanDerveer’s leadership, a testament to her willingness to adapt, evolve, and rethink as old advantages faded, new strategies emerged, or the type of players she had at her disposal simply shifted. The child of two educators, VanDerveer is a lifelong learner. For years, it was common to hear her playing piano in hotel lobbies, a later-in-life hobby she pursued with gusto. That ability to embrace the new was crucial to success in a program in which she couldn’t always get the players needed for a certain system of play. With Stanford’s admission standards, VanDerveer arguably drew from the smallest pool of recruits in the country. Still, she remained the yardstick for comparison. “For everyone in our conference, it’s ‘Tara, Tara, Tara,’ ” says Charmin Smith, ’97, MS ’00, another of VanDerveer’s former players and the head coach at UC Berkeley. “You’ve got to game-plan like Tara. You’ve got to scout like Tara. You’ve got to defend like Tara.”

It was a history of achievement built on lots of effort. Back in the ’80s and ’90s, Stanford players called their coach Video VanDerveer, or simply TV, for her appetite for breaking down game film. One of the reasons VanDerveer stopped playing the piano is that the digital age has produced a never-ending stream of clips to watch. “It’s actually not the case that people can sort of float above the details and be great leaders,” says Condoleezza Rice, director of the Hoover Institution, former Secretary of State, and a longtime VanDerveer friend and fan. “She is hyper prepared. I always said about Tara something that I like to think about myself, which is she has higher expectations of herself than anybody could ever have of her.”

Transition Time

VanDerveer had contemplated retirement many times before. Once, a decade or so ago, the late John Arrillaga Sr., ’60, one of her great supporters, persuaded her to take the summer off after hearing her detail how exhausted she was. The job is 24/7, and though she still has the energy for the 7, the 24 was getting increasingly draining. While she is enthusiastic about Stanford’s new home in the Atlantic Coast Conference—“the All-Coast Conference,” she jokes—she is concerned about other changes sweeping the sport, including the consequences of the combination of money to players and unrestricted transferring. For nearly two decades, she’s had Kate Paye, ’95, JD/MBA ’03, on her bench. “She’s a brilliant coach,” VanDerveer says. And as the last season progressed, she told Paye she was thinking about stepping back. “When the season was over, I took a week to just really reflect,” VanDerveer says. “More than anything, I asked the question, ‘Do you have the energy with what is going on right now to be the best coach for Stanford?’ ” she says. “And I couldn’t honestly say to myself that Kate wouldn’t do a better job.” As the eldest of five siblings, VanDerveer is also in the best position to take care of her 97-year-old mother, Rita. “I just feel like I want to be available for my mom.”

She has offers to do books, podcasts, and even a movie. “If I were to start with anything, it would be writing children’s books about basketball,” she says. When VanDerveer was in ninth grade, the school librarian contacted her dad to tell him, as a matter of concern more than accolade, that his daughter had read every book in the library on basketball. None of them, VanDerveer recalls, had girls in them. Thanks in large measure to her, there’s a new narrative. 

Sam Scott is a senior writer at Stanford. Email him at sscott3@stanford.edu.