In January 1979, the Idaho Vandals women’s basketball team set off on a lengthy road trip and ended up in Anchorage. It was the furthest that most of them had ever been from home. The squad was young—there were four freshmen in the starting five—but they’d started off the season strong and felt well positioned for a four-game swing through Alaska.
But their opponents had a question when they walked into the gym.
It was a fair question, the players figured, but it struck them as hilarious. They could see how someone might be mistaken. Idaho’s head coach was just 25 years old, scarcely older than her players, and still very much in playing shape. (She didn’t always participate in their grueling conditioning sessions, but the team knew that when she wanted to, she could more than keep up.) Like many of the players, she kept her hair short, in a neat bob. She’d blended right in with her roster when they’d taken their first official team photo a few weeks before. Yet she carried herself in a manner that felt so intimidating in the gym—so clearly the leader of this group—that questioning it felt absurd. She approached women’s basketball with more intensity than anyone on this roster had experienced. Her attention to detail was almost fanatical, her commitment was unquestionable and her standards were high. Here she was—the kind of personality to bring them all the way to Alaska a week before conference play started back in Idaho—and it wasn’t obvious to everyone in the gym who the coach was? “That was the first time, really, that somebody commented on who our coach was. They wanted to know,” laughs Karin Sobotta, then a freshman guard, who ultimately played four seasons for Idaho. “We just told them to guess. … Nobody ever could figure it out.” Their coach was Tara VanDerveer, in her first season at the helm of a varsity college program, just beginning work that would span decades. On that road trip to Alaska, she picked up career wins Nos. 6, 7, 8 and 9, a collection to which she has since added more than a thousand others. And Sunday, she earned win No. 1,203 to become the winningest basketball coach in the history of the NCAA, breaking a record previously held by former Duke Blue Devils men’s coach Mike Krzyzewski. VanDerveer is best known for her tenure at Stanford, where she has coached for more than 40 years, winning three championships and receiving national coach of the year honors across five decades. She has been to 14 Final Fours and coached 13 first-round WNBA draft selections. (VanDerveer could potentially add to both of those numbers this year with the No. 6 Stanford Cardinal currently led by National Player of the Year candidate Cameron Brink.) Almost immediately upon arriving at Stanford, she built the program into a powerhouse, maintaining a run of excellence even as styles of play shifted and the structure of college sports changed dramatically. But she got her start at the University of Idaho. VanDerveer spent just two seasons in that first college head coaching gig. Yet that was enough time to shape the lives of many of her players—several of whom built careers in basketball and in college sports themselves—and to lay a personal foundation for success to come. VanDerveer’s first 42 career wins came at Idaho. They were fundamental to the hundreds upon hundreds of victories that followed. And they were also the last time anyone had to ask who was coaching when the answer was Tara VanDerveer.