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Stanford’s Tara VanDerveer becomes winningest coach in major college basketball, passing Mike Krzyzewski
Only Her.
Tara VanDerveer’s face shined in every corner of Maples Pavilion with that very message. Yes, the Stanford Hall of Famer now stands atop major college basketball as the winningest coach of all time.
“Today was just so wonderful,” VanDerveer said. Even though she had to text her 96-year-old mother Rita they’d need to cancel a scheduled bridge game because of all the postgame festivities to celebrate her.
“… It is a big number and I’m very appreciative of the great players I’ve coached and the great places I’ve been and the attention it’s brought to women’s basketball.”
Just as those who love her so hoped it would turn out, VanDerveer passed former Duke and Army coach Mike Krzyzewski with her 1,203rd career victory at home in Maples when No. 8 Stanford beat Oregon State 65-56.
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And it never fails that VanDerveer always takes a minute to thank everybody for coming to the game, and that includes offering her immense gratitude to the Stanford band. On Sunday, moments after her latest remarkable milestone in a career filled with them, she politely asked the band to stop playing. VanDerveer took the microphone and began with her words of appreciation once more.
“I’m overwhelmed,” she told the crowd. “I’m not usually lost for words but it’s pretty impressive, all these people here, all the former players coming back.”
A head coach since age 24, VanDerveer celebrated with thousands of supporters and a couple dozen former players on hand to cheer her on for yet another triumph in a decorated 45-year career featuring so many memorable accomplishments.
And for a nearly full arena, this was also a chance for fans to show their love to the Hall of Fame coach who has been shining her light on women’s basketball for 4 1/2 decades.
“Tara! Tara!” they yelled in the closing seconds before the celebration began.
“This is a tremendous accomplishment for Tara VanDerveer, who is already one of the most accomplished coaches in the history of basketball,” Krzyzewski said in a statement. “This is yet another milestone to add to an amazing legacy. More important than all the astounding numbers and career accomplishments, she’s positively impacted countless lives as a coach and a mentor. Tara remains a true guardian of our sport.”
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A video tribute with messages from everyone from Billie Jean King to Steve Kerr, Dawn Staley and Coach K himself showed on the big screen.
It was tense at times, with VanDerveer standing with arms crossed and pacing the sideline as Kiki Iriafen and her supporting cast made the big plays when it mattered most — including Iriafen’s first 3-pointers. Stanford was missing All-American Cameron Brink because of a lower left leg injury suffered in Friday’s win over Oregon.
“I want to bring attention to the beauty of women’s basketball and the wonderfulness of these players that work so hard,” VanDerveer said. “I’m so jealous because I never got to do what they get to do and I’m able to watch a little girl’s dream play out through them.”
Iriafen contributed a career-high 36 points on 16-for-26 shooting and 11 rebounds and Talana Lepolo 14 points and six assists for the Cardinal (17-2, 6-1 Pac-12). The game drew a near-capacity crowd of 7,022 at Maples Pavilion, which holds 7,233.
VanDerveer improved to 1,203-267 overall and 1,051-216 over 38 seasons at Stanford. A 17-time Pac-12 Coach of the Year with five national Coach of the Year honors, VanDerveer has captured three NCAA titles with Stanford — 1990, ’92 and 2021 — and coached the 1996 U.S. Olympic team to a gold medal at the Atlanta Games during a year away from Stanford.
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Stanford led 28-22 at the break having shot just 12 of 34 but was willed in the second half as former star players such as Jennifer Azzi, Chiney Ogwumike, Ros Gold-Onwude and Jayne Appel-Marinelli were among those in attendance along with former U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice supporting the beloved coach.
“What does it mean to me? It means everything. It’s like your family member getting married or someone had a baby, Coach is making history, we all come back and we celebrate,” Ogwumike said. “It’s just a part of our life now. Showing up for Tara is the same way you show up for a sister, an aunt, a brother. She’s family to all of us.”
VanDerveer received warm ovations at every chance, from the moment she walked out onto the court during pregame warmups and again for introductions. She credited the Beavers for their grace in offering congratulations in the hand-shake line after the final buzzer.
Raegan Beers scored 18 points to lead Oregon State (15-3, 4-3), which had won three straight games.
Stanford missed 10 straight shots during a first-quarter funk before Brooke Demetre connected from deep at the 1:50 mark.
Oregon State coach Scott Rueck credits VanDerveer for elevating the entire conference over the decades.
“The most remarkable thing about her is she’s done it for so long and she’s remained at such a high level of excellence,” Rueck said. “And that’s her preparation, her attention to detail is the separator.”
Azzi offered a sentiment that hundreds of other former VanDerveer players would certainly share:
“I got to play for the greatest coach of all-time.”
It’s been said the best meals come from the heart, not from a recipe book. But at this USDA kitchen, there’s no pinch of this, dash of that, no dollops or smidgens of anything. Here, nutritionists in white coats painstakingly measure every single ingredient, down to the tenth of a gram.
Sheryn Stover is expected to eat every crumb of her pizza; any tiny morsels she does miss go back to the kitchen, where they’re scrutinized like evidence of some dietary crime.
Stover (or participant #8180, as she’s known) is one of some 10,000 volunteers enrolled in a $170 million nutrition study run by the National Institutes of Health. “At 78, not many people get to do studies that are going to affect a great amount of people, and I thought this was a great opportunity to do that,” she said.
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It’s called the Nutrition for Precision Health Study. “When I tell people about the study, the reaction usually is, ‘Oh, that’s so cool, can I do it?'” said coordinator Holly Nicastro.
She explained just what “precise” precisely means: “Precision nutrition means tailoring nutrition or dietary guidance to the individual.”
The government has long offered guidelines to help us eat better. In the 1940s we had the “Basic 7.” In the ’50s, the “Basic 4.” We’ve had the “Food Wheel,” the “Food Pyramid,” and currently, “My Plate.”
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They’re all well-intentioned, except they’re all based on averages – what works best for most people, most of the time. But according to Nicastro, there is no one best way to eat. “We know from virtually every nutrition study ever conducted, we have inner individual variability,” she said. “That means we have some people that are going to respond, and some people that aren’t. There’s no one-size-fits-all.”
The study’s participants, like Stover, are all being drawn from another NIH study program called All Of Us, a massive undertaking to create a database of at least a million people who are volunteering everything from their electronic health records to their DNA. It was from that All of Us research that Stover discovered she has the gene that makes some foods taste bitter, which could explain why she ate more of one kind of food than another.
Professor Sai Das, who oversees the study at Tufts University, says the goal of precision nutrition is to drill down even deeper into those individual differences. “We’re moving away from just saying everybody go do this, to being able to say, ‘Okay, if you have X, Y and Z characteristics, then you’re more likely to respond to a diet, and somebody else that has A, B and C characteristics will be responding to the diet differently,'” Das said.
It’s a big commitment for Stover, who is one of 150 people being paid to live at a handful of test sites around the country for six weeks – two weeks at a time. It’s so precise she can’t even go for a walk without a dietary chaperone. “Well, you could stop and buy candy … God forbid, you can’t do that!” she laughed.
While she’s here, everything from her resting metabolic rate, her body fat percentage, her bone mineral content, even the microbes in her gut (digested by a machine that essentially is a smart toilet paper reading device) are being analyzed for how hers may differ from someone else’s.
Nicastro said, “We really think that what’s going on in your poop is going to tell us a lot of information about your health and how you respond to food.”
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Stover says she doesn’t mind, except for the odd sounds the machine makes. While she is a live-in participant, thousands of others are participating from their homes, where electronic wearables track all kinds of health data, including special glasses that record everything they eat, activated when someone starts chewing. Artificial intelligence can then be used to determine not only which foods the person is eating, but how many calories are consumed.
This study is expected to be wrapped up by 2027, and because of it, we may indeed know not only to eat more fruits and vegetables, but what combination of foods is really best for us. The question that even Holly Nicastro can’t answer is, will we listen? “You can lead a horse to water; you can’t make them drink,” she said. “We can tailor the interventions all day. But one hypothesis I have is that if the guidance is tailored to the individual, it’s going to make that individual more likely to follow it, because this is for me, this was designed for me.”
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Story produced by Mark Hudspeth. Editor: Ed Givnish.
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