The End of an Era: College Basketball’s Winningest Coach Leaves a Lasting Legacy

All the information you need to know about Tara VanDerveer—the most successful college basketball coach in history—is revealed by the fact that she made the announcement at 10:35 p.m. Eastern on a Tuesday after the season was officially over.

Because she or her ego was never the focus. It was never about creating the news or making sure she was published the following day. It has to do with the game and its prospects. It was about the other people.

VanDerveer can leave women’s basketball knowing that she left it in better shape than when she found it after spending 45 years on the sidelines. On May 8, precisely 39 years to the day she was hired at Stanford, VanDerveer announced her retirement.

According to her official records, she has won 14 Final Fours, three national crowns, and 1,216 games. In over forty years—including thirty-eight at Stanford—there has only been one losing season. She is the only one with more victories than 344 Division I basketball programs, and her network of coaches spans the entire nation. Not to mention, VanDerveer led Team USA to victory in the 1996 Olympics gold medal match, which ignited the nation’s dynasty.

The sport’s all-time wins leader.
A legend of the game.
And the steward of a sisterhood that spans generations.

» https://t.co/ByAigYapHt pic.twitter.com/ElLosK4T2R

— Stanford WBB (@StanfordWBB) April 10, 2024

It feels poetic that she leaves the Pac-12 Conference and that it was the year that the women’s national title game garnered more attention than the men’s for the first time ever. Even while it is difficult to picture women’s basketball without VanDerveer, it makes complete sense that she is prepared to pass the torch. She has been building towards all of this.

After VanDerveer leaves, women’s basketball is in a better place than it has ever been. Women’s basketball has gained more attention in recent years, and it is definitely more watched and popular than it has ever been. VanDerveer has come here to witness the dam’s complete collapse. to delight in it. And now for a retrospective.

If the VanDerveer who first coached in Idaho back in 1978 could see women’s basketball right now, she wouldn’t recognize it.

For her, that was the ultimate goal of it all. Being on the sidelines was meant to do that. Her goal was for women’s basketball to surpass men’s basketball in size, quality, and competitiveness. She desired opportunities from the game. She was aware that it could be all of those things.

There were no basketball teams in the Northeast for her when she was a child, prior to Title IX. Because that was the only way to guarantee she could play on the courts in her family’s neighborhood—if the guys wanted to use her basketball, then she got to play, too—she saved up to purchase the nicest basketball she could find.

Throughout her whole career, the anguish from that recollection would pursue and burden her. Not only did she lose out on the chance to play basketball, but she also lost out on the chance to gain leadership skills, become a part of a team, and rediscover their competitive spirit, just like every other girl she knew. She would still remind young children, even sixty years later, how lucky they were to have these life skills taught to them through athletics. How appreciative they ought to be of the chance. And how they ought to pursue their dreams without wasting any time.

She battled to break into the field by requesting an unpaid internship in a letter to every institution in the nation that had a women’s basketball team. She started out as a JV coach at Ohio State, where she oversaw the team bus and handled laundry on game days. VanDerveer was asked to describe her coaching philosophy during a preliminary interview for a head coaching position. Work, was her response. Could she say anything more about that philosophy? “Difficult labor,” VanDerveer answered.

VanDerveer soaked up every minute on the sideline with her teams and took seriously her role as a shepherd for the sport as well as its future. Every team she had headed had all-female coaching staffs because she wanted to ensure that women had equal opportunity in this profession as she had. She also helped individuals in the business who were close to her. When postseason tournaments rolled around, after the Cardinals had lost, she would offer her conference counterparts the scouting reports she had on their opponents. As the venerable matriarch of the Pac-12 and the sport, she occasionally traded scouting reports with nonconference opponents. She wished each Pac-12 coach whose team had qualified for a tournament luck and expressed her pride in being connected to the other coaches and league colleges in a group text before the 2024 postseason.

There was no heads-up that this past year would be VanDerveer’s final season on the sideline. If there had been, she would’ve probably grown annoyed at the following it would’ve attracted as the season came to a close, how it could’ve taken away the attention from her players and their team. Even when she broke former Duke coach Mike Krzyzewski’s career wins record earlier this season, she initially pushed back at the administration wanting to have an emceed celebration following the game before relenting.

After so many former players and coaches had shown their gratitude, VanDerveer eventually entered the stage that evening, 45 minutes into the celebration, wearing what has become her signature look: black joggers, Nike sneakers, and a bobbed hairstyle. She acknowledged feeling speechless and overwhelmed. Eventually, though, she did find some.

“This game of basketball was invented as, always has been and always will be a team sport,” she said. “It is never about one person. And it is not about me.”

Although it is not about her, basketball would be a different game without her. VanDerveer established a norm. She will never be on the sidelines again, but that is the wonderful thing about her legacy: without her, so many other people would not be in a boardroom, a classroom, or a laboratory, much alone on the sidelines.

(Photo: Thearon W. Henderson / Getty Images)