Editor’s note: We are proud to publish this excerpt from the new book “Life’s Work: How Tara VanDerveer and Stanford Women’s Basketball Changed the Sport,” written by Naismith Hall of Fame writer and our own Michelle Smith. Readers at The IX Basketball can click here and use the code IXLIFESWORK to get 20% off the book.
Tara VanDerveer sat in her cabin in northern Minnesota, the place that had served as her respite from a nonstop coaching life, looking out at a shimmering lake. Every summer VanDerveer loaded up her dogs, Enzo and Piper, for the journey east to stay in Minnesota for a few weeks.
She dusted off her water skis and recharged in a small lakeside home, originally built in 1938 and remodeled—it had no bedroom or shower when she bought it—after she led the US Olympic team to the gold medal in Atlanta in 1996.
She grew up next to the water; spending summers in a lakeside cabin was a VanDerveer family tradition. First, it was Schroon Lake, then Saranac Lake, both in Upstate New York. Her family eventually bought a home on Lake Chautauqua in western New York that they turned into a bed-and-breakfast.
VanDerveer’s cabin in Minnesota has been her joy and her refuge. While there, she skis nearly every day. She hosts family and friends. She cooks salmon and rides her mountain bike. There isn’t a restaurant within 20 miles, but there is a boat slip, storage for her speedboat, and a view of the water in every direction. It is the place where she has been able to breathe deeply, think clearly, and rest.
But even the lake wasn’t much solace on the morning of August 4, 2023, as she woke up, checked her phone, and absorbed the unfathomable: the Pac-12 Conference, the league she led and loved, would be gone as she knew it in less than a year. The conference’s leadership couldn’t find a way to a media-rights deal that they found financially palatable. The league had already lost the Los Angeles market in 2022 when USC and UCLA decided they would move to the Big Ten for the big-time football television payday.
At the time, watching USC and UCLA depart had deeply concerned VanDerveer. Speculation about the future of the conference without the Southern California schools was already picking up steam. “Without UCLA and USC, we weren’t going to have what we’d always had,” VanDerveer said. “I was a little bit singularly focused on basketball, so I didn’t try to figure it out or plan it out or talk about it a whole lot, but that’s what people would tell me—‘Next year you’ll be in the Big Ten’—and I was thinking, Okay, whatever.”
Whatever quickly turned to more legitimate worry as the summer of 2023 began without a clear path forward for the conference as media-rights negotiations stalled. VanDerveer watched anxiously from a distance as the ground began to crumble under-neath the 108-year-old conference, despite the calls for optimism from the conference office.
On July 27, 2023, the University of Colorado announced it was leaving the Pac-12 to return to the Big 12. That left the Pac-12 with nine teams and a now-desperate fight for survival.
On August 4, the conference was prepared to hold an early morning meeting, Pac-12 leadership was feeling confident they had a plan to keep the league intact. But minutes before the meeting began, Oregon and Washington called Commissioner George Kliavkoff to inform him they were leaving for the Big Ten to join UCLA and USC.
And that was it. The wheels, as VanDerveer put it, had come off the cart. “You invest 40 years into something, and to watch it unravel in 40 minutes, it’s sad,” VanDerveer said. “And you have to process who you are angry with, you know?”
Pac-12 women’s basketball always “made sense” to VanDerveer: like-minded, high-profile academic institutions competing against one another on the West Coast. It was a group of schools that never received the same kind of attention as athletic programs on the East Coast or in the South, particularly in sports such as women’s basket-ball. There was a deep bond forged among Pac-12 coaches by that perpetual underappreciation, not to mention the excellence of their female athletes.
The women’s basketball coaches of the Pac-12 were always more collegial than most around the country in large part because VanDerveer made sure of it. They worked as a collective on improv-ing the scheduling of Pac-12 teams to boost the league’s ratings percentage index (RPI) in order to get more teams into the NCAA tournament. They legitimately rooted for one another’s success.
The decisions made that determined the fate of the Pac-12 in the summer of 2023 didn’t have anything to do with them; this was about football and money. But the impacts on sports such as women’s basketball (and others such as baseball, softball, and volleyball) would be seismic, from recruiting to travel schedules to the dissolution of regional rivalries.
VanDerveer wondered whether television executives who had driven this realignment had daughters who might attend UCLA or Stanford or Oregon someday, and whether they would want their own children to do what they would be asking future student-athletes to do—to constantly travel cross-country while trying to balance their sleep schedules, their mental health, and their aca-demic lives. “There are all kinds of situations in our world, where instead of standing up and saying ‘This isn’t right,’ we live with it,” VanDerveer said. “I don’t see this as being good for us. It is not just about the travel but the breakdown of a great league, and the implosion of our league’s very rich history.”
She tried to compartmentalize her frustration and separate it from her deep sense of loss. “I’ve been part of the Pac-12 journey the whole time,” VanDerveer said. “And I’ve loved it, so it’s a death. It is a grieving process.”
The remaining Pac-12 schools were suddenly looking for life-boats. Arizona, Arizona State, and Utah quickly joined Colorado in the Big 12. Stanford and Cal’s lifeboat moment came on September 1, 2023, when the two schools announced they would be moving to the Atlantic Coast Conference (ACC), which includes schools such as North Carolina, Duke, Louisville, and Notre Dame. It was more than a new conference; it was a whole new world, three time zones away.
In the first couple of weeks after the move was announced, none of the ACC coaches called or texted VanDerveer to welcome the Cardinal. That was already different from what she was used to. She immediately held a Zoom meeting with her players, who had not yet returned to campus for the fall semester. She asked if they had questions. She heard them tell her they were happy to be in a competitive power conference.
It was time to prepare for the coming season. Because heading into the 2023–24 season, there was work to do on multiple fronts with her current team.
Gone were veterans Haley Jones, Fran Belibi, and Ashten Prechtel to graduation—players who had helped lead Stanford to a national title in 2021. And more surprisingly, three players had chosen to transfer, including the nation’s top recruit in 2022, post player Lauren Betts. Betts, who landed at UCLA, was joined in the transfer portal by guards Agnes Emma-Nnopu (to TCU) and Indya Nivar (to North Carolina). All three had been bench players the previous season but would likely have been counted on for bigger roles in the coming season. To see three Stanford players in the transfer portal in one season was a sign of the changing landscape of the game.
Traditionally, the Cardinal program has not been one many players choose to leave. The value of playing for VanDerveer and earning a Stanford degree was compelling enough to stay, even for those who did not get the playing time they wanted.
But the game—and college sports in general—was changing in a big way. The ability for players to transfer without having to sit out a season, thanks to a change in NCAA rules, was drastically increasing player mobility across college sports. The capacity for student-athletes to earn money through Name, Image, and Likeness (NIL) deals was also becoming a more important decision point for many.
The 2022–23 season had been a disappointing one for women’s basketball at Stanford, despite the team’s 29–6 record. A second-round NCAA loss at Maples Pavilion to Mississippi was the culmination of a team that struggled with cohesion with one another and the coaching staff. VanDerveer’s culture of “sisterhood” had frayed in ways that needed to be addressed. So she addressed it. She made changes in the coaching staff, bringing back former assistant coach Tempie Brown and sports information director John Cantalupi, both sources of stability in important positions.
She enlisted the counsel of a leadership coach from the Stanford business school, something she would later say she wished she had done long before. “As coaches, all we know is what we know,” VanDerveeer said. “Maybe having a [leadership] coach sooner would have helped me avoid some of the challenges I’ve had with players through the years, or would have helped me to be a better leader and a better coach for my players. I don’t pretend to be anywhere near perfect, and there are so many things I could have done better.”
A big dose of good news came when Hannah Jump, one of the best three-point shooters in program history, made the decision to return for a fifth season provided by the eligibility waiver the NCAA granted to players who had played during the COVID-19 pandemic. All-American center Cameron Brink anchored the team along with Jump and sophomore point guard Talana Lepolo. And VanDerveer had high hopes for junior forward Kiki Iriafen, who had shown flashes of elite-level play the previous season. Stanford was picked in the preseason coaches’ poll to finish third in the final Pac-12 Conference race.
As the conference’s teams gathered in Las Vegas in October 2023 for the league’s annual preseason media day, the Pac-12 elephant in the room was huge. As 12 coaches and the players representing their programs came into the press room at the Park MGM Grand, they all talked as teams talk at the beginning of the season—about growth and expectations and excitement for a season that was only a handful of weeks away. National preseason polls came out, and teams discussed their need to prove themselves, to test themselves, and to measure themselves against their own standards. The usual stuff, in a most unusual set of circumstances.
VanDerveer was the one, unsurprisingly, to address the impending breakup of the conference head-on, calling it “heartbreaking.” “This has been my whole life. I woke up when I heard about it, and I said, ‘I’m in a bad dream. This is a nightmare,’” VanDerveer said to the press that day. “But we are committed to this year being a great year. Our team’s theme is ‘Best year ever,’ and I think that’s kind of what everyone wants.”
Readers at The IX Basketball can use the code IXLIFESWORK to get 20% off the book.