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When the final horn sounds Tuesday night and Stanford’s Tara VanDerveer becomes the winningest coach in the history of women’s college basketball, there will be much more emotion exhibited by her players and her assistants than by the woman of the hour.
I’ve seen it play out before. Her 800th career victory. Her 900th and her 1,000th milestones.
It always has been the same reaction. Gracious, heartfelt appreciation with an overlay of aw-shucks humility.
With one more victory — she has 1,098 of them — VanDerveer will break the record held by the late Pat Summitt, her friend and rival. Victory No. 1,099 is expected to come Tuesday night when Stanford, ranked No. 1 in the country with a 4-0 record, meets a University of the Pacific team that hasn’t yet played a game.
History will be made in an empty gym, not because of women’s basketball’s place in the sports world, but because of a global pandemic. UOP is allowing no spectators into the Alex G. Spanos Center in Stockton. No media either, with one notable exception: ESPN2 will televise the game live, starting at 6 p.m. (Update: UOP announced Tuesday morning that it will also allow a photographer and a reporter from the Associated Press to document the history event.)
Strangely, the health crisis will spare VanDerveer, 67, from the spotlight she never has sought. Hers is not a false humility. She believes in a sense of decorum that has been passed to hundreds of players for 42 years, the last 35 of them at Stanford.
“I’ve always loved her understated presence,” said Steve Kerr, coach of the Golden State Warriors. “She is understated but she is clearly in charge. When you’re in the room with her, yeah, she’s the boss. She doesn’t need to yell and scream. It is more poise and knowledge and the players feel that. And then she keeps churning out these great teams year after year.”
Ten years ago, VanDerveer had a transcendent team similar to the one that will play Tuesday night. That did not stop the coach from delivering a stern lecture to a locker room full of future WNBA players on the eve of a Sweet 16 game against Georgia.
VanDerveer was incensed upon learning two players had forgotten their basketball shoes on the way to a pre-game practice. To highlight the point, VanDerveer went public with the anecdote. It was her way to get the players to embrace a VanDerveer trademark: attention to detail leads to winning games.
I’ve seen the philosophy play out many times since meeting VanDerveer in 1992 at the Final Four in Los Angeles where the Cardinal won its last NCAA title.
Back then VanDerveer built a reputation as an in-your-face coach. By the time I started covering the Cardinal in 2008 for this news organization VanDerveer’s approach had softened.
But practices were no less intense. An egregious call from a referee still can summon the Terrifying Tara of years past.
Mostly, though, VanDerveer transmit her messages with an upstate New York homespun charm. Sunday night, after tying the record with an 83-38 rout of Cal, she borrowed one of her late father’s quotes to credit all players behind those victories.
“You don’t win the Kentucky Derby on donkeys,” she said.
The landmark record also presents a quandary for VanDerveer. She had a close relationship with Summitt, the Tennessee legend who ended a 38-year coaching career in 2012 at age 59 after a diagnosis of early-onset Alzheimer’s. Summitt died in 2016.
A year older than VanDerveer, Summit probably would still be coaching — and winning — this season. All things being equal, it is difficult to imagine VanDerveer ever having overtaken Summitt’s record.
That would have been preferable to VanDerveer, I bet. She always has cherished relationships more than records and trophies.
“I think the thing I learned the most was just how much her players loved playing for her,” VanDerveer said Sunday when talking about Summitt. “As a coach, I think that’s all of our goals. To be like Pat is to be a coach where your players love playing for you.”
It seems the coaching fraternity loves learning from VanDerveer because of the way she supports others. The coach has been an unpretentious figure in a business dominated by outsized personalities.
It’s one factor that led to healthy friendships with both Connecticut’s Geno Auriemma and Summitt, the game’s two most successful coaches. Auriemma and Summitt had a fierce feud that led to the schools in 2007 to quit playing each other in the regular season.
Stanford, on the other hand, had Tennessee on its non-conference schedule for decades and also faced UConn in a home-and-away series from 2009-2014.
Auriemma, a year younger than VanDerveer, probably will overcome the Stanford coach one day. He was the fastest coach to win 1,000 games and has won 11 NCAA titles. Now in his 36th season at Connecticut, Auriemma has 1,092 victories.
With VanDerveer scoring big recruiting classes the past two years, the Cardinal should keep winning for a while. VanDerveer might get close to Duke’s Mike Krzyzewski, who at age 73 has the most Division I wins in basketball with 1,159.
VanDerveer recently told me she feels great and that she was as excited as ever to get into Maples Pavilion to work with her players. The word retirement did not come up.
Meantime, history is just around the corner.
