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It’s curious how monumental achievements can reside in a person as muted as Tara VanDerveer. The Stanford coach is a swathe of gray amid the acid wash of college sports, visibly classical and long tenured in her neutral suits and narrow-rimmed steel glasses. At some point in the next few days, VanDerveer will break the career record for wins by a college basketball coach, male or female, passing Mike Krzyzewski at 1,202. She will meet the moment with her usual plainness. Or you might call it timelessness.

As her former player Jennifer Azzi has said of VanDerveer, “She doesn’t live life very loudly.” You won’t find her on social media, amid the foam-mouthed creatures and varmints-for-pay picking through the turned-over dumpster of online culture. “I don’t know how to do Instagram. I don’t have a Facebook account. I don’t do Twitter. I read books,” VanDerveer says. She is, to use an old-fashioned term, lettered. Recently she had a guest to her locker room: Nobel Prize winner Carolyn Bertozzi, the founder of bioorthogonal chemistry.

Yet as a coach, she’s never outmoded, her teams in the vanguard no matter what the decade, four of them now and counting. VanDerveer was there for the advent of the three-point line in the late 1980s, and she’s still here in the era of NIL deals and the transfer portal. Her star senior, Cameron Brink, signed a deal with New Balance, making her the company’s first women’s basketball athlete. And the Cardinal’s signature combination of teasing passes and sharp shooting has made an admirer of Golden State Warriors guard Stephen Curry, who affectionately calls VanDerveer a “hoop head” and says of the record, “I hope she gets her flowers.”

At 71, she’s doing some of her best work. Brink is the lone senior on an exceedingly young squad, with seven freshmen or sophomores, but VanDerveer has the Cardinal at 15-2 and ranked eighth, and it is poised to break the record for her as soon as Sunday, when it plays Oregon State at home. Give VanDerveer a gawky 18-year-old, and four years later, she will hand you back as polished and skilled a player as you can find anywhere.

She has sent 32 players to the WNBA, 14 of them first-round draft picks. Which might be as worthy of marvel as anything she has done at Stanford because the conventional wisdom when she took the job in 1985 was that it was impossible to recruit top talent there, given the academic standards. “It’s a special place, but it’s not an easy place to win,” she concedes.

She didn’t always get the top recruits. Sometimes she got raw or underrated projects she believed in, such as Katy Steding. As a freshman, Steding tried out for a U.S. national team and was sent back to campus with the following evaluation: “weak and slow.” By the time VanDerveer got done with her, Steding was the national player of the year and set the record for three-pointers in the 1990 NCAA championship game (six), which stood until Caitlin Clark broke it last year with eight.

Then there was Nneka Ogwumike. On Ogwumike’s first day of practice as a freshman, VanDerveer said to her, “Do you have any moves you want to work on?” Ogwumike just shrugged and said, “No, they just threw me the ball, and I shot it.” VanDerveer replied, “Well, we’ll work on some moves.” You know the rest: Ogwumike became the No. 1 overall pick in the WNBA draft and an MVP.

Whenever VanDerveer approaches a milestone, it’s always striking, how invariably oblivious she is to where she stands. “What milestone?” she asked when a Los Angeles Times reporter broached the subject of the record this month. It’s not that she’s self-deprecating. It’s that she learned a long time ago how ephemeral winning is. She has spent 45 years as a head coach, and just three of those seasons ended with a national championship trophy.

“It can’t be all about winning,” she says. “If that’s all it’s about, you’re not going to get that.”

Even a championship doesn’t last very long, emotionally. A week? “Try a couple of hours,” she says.

If it was just about the winning, she couldn’t have stood it all these years, especially that long gap in midcareer. In 1996, VanDerveer took a year-long leave from her program to coach the Olympic team, led by two all-time greats in Dawn Staley and Lisa Leslie, to a 60-0 record and a gold medal at the Atlanta Games. It sparked an explosion in popularity and resulted in the birth of the WNBA. But it didn’t just cost her a season; it took her years to rebuild. She went a full decade without reaching a Final Four, from 1998 to 2008, and wouldn’t see the championship podium again until 2021.

At times the effort left her so exhausted she contemplated retirement. Instead, she figured out how to pace herself. She no longer grinds year-round, taking off large parts of the summer to read by a lake at her summer home. This summer, it was Abraham Verghese’s epic, “The Covenant of Water.” Her staff shoulders the load in those months, “so I can save the treads on my tires,” she says.

She cultivates difficult hobbies, absorbing ones that force her to mentally escape: One year, it was studying classical piano; another year, it was cross-training for triathlons. In season, she keeps herself refreshed with two hours of exercise a day, walking, biking and swimming, and most afternoons she plays an hour of online bridge. She’s a 71-year-old who looks and sounds 40.

Sally Jenkins: Beneath Kim Mulkey’s image is a serious coach with a deft touch

A fortunately mild temperament also has extended her working life. VanDerveer has a teacherly disposition that is perhaps an anachronism, especially next to bolder figures in the women’s game — the snapping ferocity of Staley, the carnival barking of Kim Mulkey, the withering combativeness of Geno Auriemma. But it has allowed her to deal peaceably with the inevitable setbacks and reversals of coaching at Stanford. She can count on two fingers the number of times she has gone ballistic on teams — and she hated the way it felt.

“Being a maniac did not fit me,” she says. “You know. It just was exhausting … You’ve got to be yourself and know what works for you. I kind of figured that out.”

She’s at heart an educator whose real satisfaction is to “take players to a place they couldn’t get by themselves.” The winning is just the runoff of that. As the seasons wear on, she doesn’t tire of working with players.

“Honestly, they charge my battery,” she says. “I get energy from them.” Especially young ones on the verge of breakthroughs, such as the team she has now.

“They grow up,” she says. “Sometimes it’s ‘two steps up, one step back,’ you know, but as long as we’re going in the right direction and going together . . .”

As long as that happens, she will keep going — and the records will keep falling.

2017 National Press Foundation Chairman's Citation 

2017 Best Sports Stories 

2013 First Place, Associated Press Sports Editors for Investigative Series

2011 Sports Columnist of the Year, Society of Professional Journalists

2011 First Place, Associated Press Sports Editors, Columns

2010 First Place, Associated Press Sports Editors,  Columns

2008 Sports Columnist of the Year, Society of Professional Journalists  

2007 Best Sports Stories 

2005 Inducted National Sports Writers and Sportscasters Hall of Fame (first woman)

2003 First Place, Associated Press Sports Editors, Columns 

2001 First Place, Associated Press Sports Editors, Columns

2001 Sports Columnist of the year, Society of Professional Journalists

The Real All Americans 

The State of Jones

Sum It Up (with Pat Summitt)

Stanford University, B.A. English Literature

Sally Jenkins is a sports columnist and feature writer for The Washington Post. She began her second stint at The Washington Post in 2000 after spending the previous decade working as a book author and as a magazine writer.

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Stanford’s Tara VanDerveer near career wins record in singular fashion

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