Friends and rivals VanDerveer, Staley meet in Final Four
Stanford’s Tara VanDerveer has a long history with her coaching opponent Friday in the Final Four at the Alamodome in San Antonio.
VanDerveer, 67, coached South Carolina’s Dawn Staley through the storied 1996 Summer Olympics run and they have been friends since. Staley, a three-time Olympic gold medalist, was VanDerveer’s guard during the undefeated tournament at the Atlanta Games.
VanDerveer also defeated Staley’s University of Virginia team when Stanford won its two Final Fours in 1990 and 1992.
VanDerveer, women’s college basketball’s all-time winningest coach, then defeated Staley’s South Carolina teams the first four times they played.
But in 2017, Staley leapfrogged her former mentor in the national semifinals — Stanford’s last appearance in a Final Four before this year.
South Carolina rallied
past Stanford and went on to win its first national title.
Four years ago, Staley said playing for VanDerveer on the U.S. team “opened my eyes to seeing basketball coached and played at a different level.”
She has turned the Gamecocks into one of the country’s elite programs — just like VanDerveer, who has guided Stanford to its eighth Final Four in the past 13 years, its 14th appearance overall.
No. 1-seeded South Carolina walloped Texas 6234 in the Elite Eight to reach its third Final Four since 2015. The Gamecocks (26-4) held Texas scoreless in the fourth quarter, which was an NCAA Tournament first. Now they face the tournament’s No. 1 overall seeded team in Stanford (29-2), which is riding an 18-game win streak. The Cardinal earned its first overall top seeding since 1996.
But Stanford needed a masterful second-half rally to race past secondseeded Louisville 78-63 behind sophomore substitute Ashten Prechtel’s 16 points and Lexi Hull’s 21 points.
Top-seeded Connecticut faces No. 3 Arizona in the other semifinal game Friday. The winners advance to the national championship on Sunday.
The Final Four has the distinction of having two Black head coaches — Staley and Arizona’s Adia Barnes — for the first time in history. Staley said after the Elite Eight victory that representation matters for the athletic directors who hire coaches.
“I was cheering for (Barnes) to get it done, not for any other reason besides us being represented at the biggest stage of women’s college basketball,”
Staley said. “That’s because so many Black coaches out there don’t get the opportunity. When ADs don’t see it, they don’t see it.
“And they’re going to see it on the biggest stage Friday night.”
Staley, 50, has always seen the bigger picture, even when she was leading the United States to Olympic glory.
But she mostly is focused on the Gamecocks’ path to a second national title. South Carolina has gone through adversity this season to reach the Final Four.
“Every single one of our players has gone through something,” she said.
Staley said an assistant coach lost her mother during the NCAA Tournament that has been held in its entirety in San Antonio because of concerns about the COVID-19 pandemic. The coach said a player lost an uncle the other day.
“Inside of this team there has always been an oneness,” Staley said. “Deep inside of them they just want to win. Throughout the year they just didn’t know how to win utilizing people around them.”
Van Derveer said she did not recognize her team in a hellish first half against Louisville, which built a 12-point lead at the intermission. But the Cardinal has pressed on through difficult times for much of the season.
“Sometimes you just have to go through adversity, and we’ve been going through adversity all year long,” the coach said in reference to being away from Stanford for 63 days because of Santa Clara County’s restrictions to slow the spread of the coronavirus.
The Cardinal got a stern lecture from Van Derveer, a Naismith Hall of Fame coach who passed Pat Summitt this season to become the all-time winningest coach in the game.
“We were getting pummeled,” VanDerveer said. “I think our team just decided that we were going to be throwing the punches instead of being the recipient. We got more aggressive.”
The coach also pulled her senior star aside after Kiana Williams made only one of her first 12 shots.
VanDerveer said she told Williams to just run her team. “Be a leader on the team and play through spurts,” VanDerveer said. “I’ll be honest with you. I got on Kiana and really our whole team, and Kiana stepped up just so big in the second half.”
Williams scored her season-average 14 points as the Cardinal began making shots and getting stops midway through the third quarter.
Stanford might need to call on the bench again against South Carolina depending on the availability of forward Cameron Brink. The 6-foot-4 freshman suffered what appeared to be a calf muscle injury in the first half. She received treatment behind the court and returned.
“She told me she could go back in, but when she was out there, she didn’t move the way I wanted her to,” Vanderveer said.
That’s when the coach turned to the 6-5 Prechtel, who made all six of her shots in the second half. VanDerveer said she did not have an update on Brink’s injury after the game.
Brink, the country’s leading freshman shotblocker with 79 blocks this season, received “a lot of ice and treatment,” associate head coach Kate Paye said Wednesday.
Stanford has not lost since Brink became a starter on Jan. 24. If she is not ready the Cardinal might have to look elsewhere for help on Friday.
It would not be the first time Stanford adjusted this season.