Tara VanDerveer living her spartan life
Mike Anthony
Outside her spartan existence of watching film and more film as coach at Stanford, Tara VanDerveer lives a life of simple joys.
She swims a lot at the outdoor Avery Aquatics Center on campus, often with Katie Ledecky in the next lane, and plays bridge online with her mother for an hour each day. She spends summers waterskiing and sailing and attending lectures and festivals near her family home in Chataqua Lake, N.Y.
VanDerveer is unique. So is Geno Auriemma for his own personality traits and interests. So was Pat Summitt for her approach and pursuits. These three basketball giants, different in who they are and where they’re from and where they’ve established themselves, have spent parts of six decades as the faces of their respective programs and a sport’s steady rise.
They now top a prestigious list, with VanDerveer last month and Auriemma this week passing Summitt in career victories. VanDerveer has 1,105 and Auriemma has 1,100 after UConn’s victory Thursday over Tennessee, the latest occasion for Geno-Pat-Pat-Geno conversations now joined by the Geno-Tara-TaraGeno theme.
“When you think of women’s basketball, Pat is Tennessee, Geno is Connecticut and I think with Stanford it’s me,” VanDerveer said. “My dad honestly told me [in 1985], ‘You’re crazy. You’ll be home in three months, because you can’t win at Stanford.’ I said, ‘Dad, we just have to get three or four of the best players from around the country.’ And we were able to do that.”
VanDerveer, who won national championships in her fifth and seventh seasons but has yet to add another, went on to call herself, Auriemma and Summitt “Guardians of the game.” She also noted that we’re unlikely to again experience simultaneous runs of such icons.
There are wonderful coaches out there, as many as ever, from Dawn Staley to Kim Mulkey to Jeff Walz to Kelly Graves and beyond. But we should appreciate the era of Tara, Geno and Pat, what each has done separately, and together. VanDerveer became a head coach at age 25, Auriemma at 31, Summitt at just 22.
They continue to be — in practice, or in legacy — the guardians.
“You probably couldn’t find three more different people growing in three more different environments,” Auriemma said. “To converge at that place is pretty improbable. It’s a function, I think, of the longevity that it takes, the number of times you have to be willing to get up in the morning and go do it again, the number of offseasons where you might have thought, ‘Do I really want to do this again? And then you go do it again . ... Here we are after all these years, and it is highly improbable.”
VanDerveer, 67, began at Idaho in 1978, moved to Ohio State two years later and was hired at Stanford in 1985, the same year Auriemma came to UConn. She was born in Melrose, Mass., raised just north of Albany and most of her professional success has come in the Bay Area. Her overall record is 1,105-254.
Auriemma, 66, was born in Italy, raised in Norristown, Pa., and has set a new basketball standard in Storrs, with 11 national championships. His record is 1,099-142.
Summitt, who retired in 2012 and died in 2016 at age 64, was the trailblazer. She was born and raised in Tennessee and she stayed there, the first to draw real interest in women’s basketball from a general sports audience, winning eight national championships. She finished 1,098-208.
Now, Auriemma and VanDerveer continue on neck and neck. Both have been recognized for milestones in the midst of a bizarre season and trying times, running programs through a pandemic.