In News: Tara VanDerveer and her players win title the hard way, naturally.
Stanford women win their first national championship in 29 years
The long championship drought has ended for Tara VanDerveer and the Stanford women’s basketball program.
The Cardinal (31-2) won its first national title in 29 years Sunday by defeating Pac-12 Conference rival Arizona 5453 in a climactic finish to a season with chaos around every corner.
The return to San Antonio 11 years after Stanford last played — and lost — in the championship game ended fittingly.
The victory could not have been more difficult. Of course it couldn’t for VanDerveer and the Cardinal.
Clinging to a one-point lead, Stanford committed a shot-clock violation on its final offensive possession, giving Arizona 6.1 seconds to score a gamewinner.
Sophomore Haley Jones said VanDerveer told the players: “This is the last 6 seconds you have as a team.”
Three Cardinal defenders collapsed on Arizona All-American Aari McDonald, forcing her into a difficult longrange shot that bounced off the back of the rim as time expired in an emotionally draining finish to the Final Four at the Alamodome.
VanDerveer, women’s college basketball’s all-time winningest coach, won two titles in her first three appearances in the Final Four, starting in 1990.
Since then, it seemed as if Stanford would never get another championship.
The school had failed to win titles in 10 Final Four appearances since 1992.
As happy as she was to celebrate the crown with this team, VanDerveer, 67, did not feel any huge sense of relief in capturing her long-awaited third title.
“This isn’t why I coach,” she said. “I want to be a teacher.”
But VanDerveer knew she had a team with the kind of grit, poise and talent to change the program’s fortunes.
Senior All-American Kiana Williams said the seeds of the championship took root in September when the players got in trouble for breaking a five-day quarantine. On the fourth day, Williams said they went to an off-campus court to play pick-up games.
VanDerveer told the players their actions left her heartbroken.
“The only way to make up for that was to win a national championship for her,” Williams said.
But it was not an easy path to meet that goal.
The Cardinal spent two months away from campus from early November to early February because of Santa Clara County’s strict guidelines for COVID-19. In the end, those months away from home prepared the players for a threeweek stay in San Antonio. NCAA officials created a “bubble” environment by scheduling all tournament games in San Antonio as a precaution against the spread of the coronavirus.
Even when they arrived in the Final Four, it took two missed South Carolina shots at the buzzer for the Cardinal to reach the championship game with a 66-65 victory. But one heart-pounding defensive finish wasn’t enough; VanDerveer’s team needed another lastsecond victory to seal the third title.
“We had some special karma going for us,” VanDerveer said. “We dodged
the bullet against South Carolina” and then again Sunday. “Sometimes you just got to be lucky.”
Leading the way in the title game was Jones, the Archbishop Mitty High School graduate and rising star who took over in the Final Four. She had 17 points and eight rebounds to single-handedly lift Stanford to victory Sunday when the Cardinal looked out of sorts.
Jones is a 6-foot-1 sophomore raised in Santa Cruz who can play every position on the court. On Sunday, she focused on freeing herself of defenders while spinning, dribbling and flying into the lane to make eight of her 14 shots.
Stanford needed Jones to play big one more time. Williams, who led the Cardinal throughout the season, struggled for the third consecutive game with only five points, committing six of the Cardinal’s 21 turnovers.
Jones said she reminded her teammates in a lategame huddle: “Guys, this is nothing compared to what we went through all season.”
Arizona (21-5), finished second to Stanford in the Pac-12 standings, losing twice to the Cardinal during the regular season. But the Wildcats looked like the country’s best team in the tournament, marching to their first-ever Final Four appearance.
While Stanford earned the top overall seeding, Arizona was third in the Mercado region. The Wildcats won the region and then stunned top-seeded Connecticut 69-59 on Friday night in the national semifinals.
It had been in 11 years since Stanford reached the final act. In 2010, the Cardinal held mighty Connecticut to a mere 12 points in the first half but lost 53-47 because All-American Jayne Appel played on a broken right ankle in the championship, also held at the Alamodome.
VanDerveer was known as a winner but some wondered after all these years if she could win one more big one.
The Naismith Hall of Fame coach never wavered. She parlayed two outstanding recruiting classes into a championship.
And she did it through a global health crisis while being named national coach of the year by three different organizations in the past week.
VanDerveer didn’t really want to have a college basketball season as the death toll mounted because of the COVID-19 outbreak. She questioned whether it made sense to play basketball during a pandemic.
She and the Cardinal felt the impact of the pandemic through their travels, game cancellations and some positive virus tests. But night after night, they fought, finishing the season as champions on a 20-game win streak.
Would VanDerveer consider retirement after finally breaking through Sunday? Perhaps later, she said.
“I’m really excited about the young people who committed” to Stanford, VanDerveer said, already thinking about next season and beyond.
Then she added a caveat: “I don’t know if I can go through another COVID year.”