Dozens of Cardinal fans were screaming themselves hoarse at the University of Oregon’s McArthur Court. With their team down by a point and 3.3 seconds remaining in the game, they didn’t know what to expect.
“It was pandemonium—the most exciting away game I’ve been to in four years,” Denice Merlo, an ardent supporter from El Granada, Calif., recalls of the January 11 game. “There was never any doubt in my mind that our coaches had some strategy going, but some people around me were saying, ‘Oh, no!’ ”
Then sophomore forward T’Nae Thiel stepped up and heaved a 70-foot Hail Mary pass downcourt to teammate Nicole Powell. The 6-foot-2 All-American junior snagged the ball above the head of her defender and went up for a layup.
“I saw the ball go up, hit the bottom of the backboard and fall, without going in,” recalls Janet Hauber, a retired metallurgist from Hayward, Calif. “Nicole was on the floor, and the crowd was just insane. It took me a second or two before I realized that the refs had called a foul.”
Powell had to make the first free throw to get a chance at a second basket. As more than 5,200 Duck fans thundered, her shot hit the back of the rim, then the front, and slowly dropped in—tying the score.
In the stunned, momentary lull that followed, the Cardinal contingent yelled, “Come on, Nicole! You can do it!”
And she did, swishing the second shot and giving sixth-ranked Stanford a 75-74 win against one of its toughest Pac-10 competitors.
Hauber and Menlo went wild, as did 40 or so others, mostly women, who had traveled to Oregon from the Bay Area as the diehard core of a booster group called the Fast Break Club.
An hour later, when the Cardinal players trooped into the lobby of the inn where everyone was staying, the club members launched a wave of welcoming cheers. “It was crazy,” Powell said to them. “It was just crazy. Thank you so much for coming.”
Then the four coaches gathered in front of the lobby’s crackling fireplace and spent a few minutes answering questions from their biggest supporters. Why hadn’t the referees called an intentional foul on the final play, giving Powell an automatic two free throws? And what about that three-quarter-court inbounds pass?
“Vanessa [Nygaard, ’97, of the WNBA Portland Fire] talked to the players in the locker room after the game and told them she’d practiced that play hundreds of times in Maples—and never thought it would work,” head coach Tara VanDerveer said, prompting laughter. “But T’Nae had a huge game, and that pass she made was a [Joe] Montana pass.”
RECONNAISSANCE: A booster might scout the visitor’s bench for clues to the opponent’s strategies.
Noting that the young team had rallied in the second half of several games this season, VanDerveer added, “They keep finding a way to win. And this year has been, by far, the most exciting one yet.”
It wasn't always like this. When VanDerveer first arrived as head coach in 1985, the turnout for women’s games at Maples Pavilion was a listless 30 or so, in contrast to the thousands of fans she’d seen regularly at Ohio State, where she had coached the women’s team to four Big Ten championships in a row. At Stanford, VanDerveer recalls, “there was a lack of coverage in the local papers and a lack of fans. We needed to turn the program around.”
In the fall of 1991, on the heels of an NCAA championship, she organized the Fast Break Club—not to be confused with the students’ Brickyard Club, which also roots for the women’s basketball team. Ten people showed up for the first meeting, and soon others signed on, gathering in a white tent outside Maples after every home game to talk with players and coaches.
READ MY LIPS: Coach Tara VanDerveer rallies the home team.
Today the club has more than 400 members, who pay from $100 (for individual memberships) to $499 (per family) for packages that include T-shirts, media guides, access to pre- and postgame chalk talks, player trading cards and more. About 70 percent of the members are women from the Bay Area who have joined individually or with their families. Aside from the kids who attend with their parents, almost everyone is over 30.
Like the Lady Raiders of Texas Tech, the Maroon Platoon of Southwest Missouri State and the Boost-Hers of Tennessee, Stanford’s Fast Break Club members know basketball inside out and speak the lingo fluently, dissecting double screens, 1-3-1 half-court traps and cherry picks, and scrutinizing every substitution. During pregame warm-ups, they really, really concentrate. (One member who is a psychotherapist encourages the group to focus “positive images” on each player.) Back at home after a game, they pore over the e-mailed play-by-play notes that club member K.T. Lim, a software engineer in Palo Alto, takes on his customized HP 200LX palmtop PC. “Then Kelley Suminski banked one off the glass on a drive, Suminski got a THREE! ball to fall after nearly popping out, and King poked the ball to Perryman for a sweet banked layup from the right block.”
Fast Break generates financial as well as moral support. VanDerveer says funds raised through club efforts have enabled her program to buy video-editing equipment, a mechanical shooting machine and laptop computers for the coaches. An auction in January brought in more than $37,000 for the team’s trip to Italy this summer by selling a range of goodies including autographed player jerseys, guest spots on the coaches’ bench and videotaped sessions with assistant coaches Julie Rousseau and Karen Middleton.
For the 40 to 50 most zealous members, boosterism costs a bundle. These fans spend thousands of dollars apiece on airfare, hotels, rental cars and food as they follow the team on the road every season. Harriet Benson of Palo Alto, a retired vice president of a pharmaceutical company, says her experience mirrors that of many others in the club. She started attending home games in the early 1990s, when the team won two national titles, then bought season tickets, began to participate in Fast Break events and ultimately took up traveling to away games. In recent years, she has crisscrossed the nation, from North Carolina to Hawaii. This season, she followed the team to Los Angeles, Seattle, Tucson, Knoxville, Tenn., and Pullman, Wash. If Stanford makes it to the Final Four in Atlanta this year, you can be sure she’ll be there.
IN THE STANDS: Marion Hatland, Andrea Boehmer and Lily Wong analyze a complicated play.
And what do they do when the season ends? The transition can be difficult, says Hauber, one of the club’s most devoted members. “I go into withdrawal,” she says. “I have to dig out my videotape of the first half we played against [powerhouse] Old Dominion in 1997. The first half—not the second.”
Benson has chronicled the growth of the club in We Win: Basketball from the Bleachers, a manuscript currently under review by several publishers. In documenting Fast Break history, she includes the wild and zany, like the time in the 1993-94 season when they sang To the Hoop (to the tune of At the Hop) on Palo Alto cable TV to bring out more fans, and their attempt to fill in for the Band at last year’s postseason Pac-10 tournament. “The Band had done something bad and couldn’t be there, so we tried to rally,” Hauber explains. The women went on a marathon shopping trip for toy musical instruments and green and red felt, which they used to sew a Tree costume and Band vests for themselves. At the game, Hauber says, “we played our kazoos like crazy.”
Fans sign on for many reasons. Merlo joined after she brought her daughter, Crissy—who was self-conscious about being 5-foot-8 in junior high—to basketball camp at Stanford. Today, Merlo serves as the club’s executive director. Margy Lim and Betsy Davis, who live near each other in Menlo Park, brought their daughters to games at Maples when the girls began playing basketball in fourth grade. Now that both of Lim’s children are in college, she’s taken up traveling to away games. “With no more kids in school, I thought I’d hit the road,” she says.
SNAPPED SHOT: Deb Gumbley captures split-second action in the paint.
In her book, Benson interviews a number of people who joined because they were inspired by individual players. Retired internist Mitch Takahashi, MD ’58, of Walnut Creek, told her: “One of the first games I saw, Rachel Hemmer [’95] got hit in the eye. I thought girls cried when they got hurt. Not Rachel! She was furious and couldn’t wait to get back into the game.”
And Dana Stewart of Palo Alto, an outsourcing manager for Pinnacle, may speak for many of the pre-Title IX women who fill the bleacher seats when she adds, “These girls are doing something I didn’t get to do. And they have uniforms with their names!”
Fast Break members “are as passionate about promoting and helping our team as our team is about playing,” says VanDerveer, who wrote the foreword to Benson’s book. “They’re there for a purpose—to support the team. I mean, why else would you go to Eugene, Oregon?”
POSTGAME: Arlene Rusche, Lily Wong, Margo Tenold, Clara Brock and Harriet Benson gather to compare notes.
In fact, Eugene may be the group’s favorite venue. When the Cardinal plays Oregon State and the University of Oregon, club members stay at the same hotel as the team—the Valley River Inn, on the banks of the Willamette River—where they can chat informally with players and coaches at the breakfast buffet or around the fireplace late at night. Off the main lobby there’s a grand piano where VanDerveer puts in her own pregame practice. Players and fans constantly cross paths at a nearby mall, lured by the absence of a state sales tax. High on the list of annual Eugene rituals: waiting to see what bargains assistant coach Rousseau, the team’s designated fashion consultant, will pick up in the local boutiques.
When the boosters gather for dinner each evening, savoring sockeye salmon or Idaho trout, conversation focuses not on their lives but on the business at hand. They reminisce about favorite games and players, and they love to diss opposing coaches, like USC’s Chris Gobrecht, whom they call “Sit Down, Chris!” From time to time, players’ parents will join for meals, with the understanding, because of NCAA rules, that they have to pay their own way.
“We still get together with the parents of Milena Flores [’00] when we go to Washington games, and we’ve stayed in touch with Carolyn Moos’s [’01] family,” says Richard Nancarrow, a defense-contracts specialist from Fremont, who flew to New York City last New Year’s Day with his partner, Francis Hessing, to see the Cardinal women play Rutgers and Fordham. “Jack St. Clair [father of Lauren, ’02] used to say he was so glad we traveled with the team because he felt we were the parents away from home.”
CHALK TALK: VanDerveer takes questions from club members in Arrillaga Sports Center.
Although members spend big bucks on away games and often have to take vacation time from work, it’s worth it, says Robin Dunaway, an attorney in Oakland. “It’s a happy trade-off, since we get the pleasure of watching a terrific game in a venue that may have a long basketball history, like [Eugene’s] ‘Mac’ court, while showing our appreciation for the extraordinary effort and dedication of the Stanford players.”
It’s tempting to ponder the trade-off for the team. Given a choice, would the coaches prefer to have vocal fans at away games, or would they rather have club members simply donate their travel money?
When Benson posed that question to Amy Tucker, the team’s associate head coach, Tucker didn’t skip a beat: “I’d rather have people traveling. Definitely. The support you generate in our games is more important.”
