By Morris Phillips
This is the week to tell Tara VanDerveer stories. The unquestioned titan of college basketball coaching retired after 38 seasons at Stanford with an all-time record 1,216 wins overall. VanDerveer arrived on the Farm in 1985 and turned a fledgling program into a national powerhouse in her first five seasons, then never took her foot off the gas. Great players, national title contending teams, and big crowds became the norm, and I watched it all unfold in person.
I have Tara VanDerveer stories on demand for my most qualified audiences. This is easily the best one.
On March 30, 2009, VanDerveer and her Cardinal team were riding a 19-game win streak, just another sign that VanDerveer had recaptured the magic that disappeared when her teams went an unprecedented decade without a Final Four appearance, a dry spell that ended a year earlier in March 2008. Led by 6’4” Jayne Appel, the Cardinal were better known for their supporting cast than Appel, who dominated other Pac-12 post players without putting up eye-popping numbers or drawing attention she deserved as the best player on the West Coast’s best team.
Ironically, the best example of Appel’s flying under the radar came earlier that season in Hawaii when Stanford routed Iowa State–their March 30th opponent–by 38 points with Appel scoring just six. For Iowa State coach Bill Fennelly that rough loss was the impetus for his strategy in the rematch: leave Appel one-on-one in the paint and implore his Cyclones to clamp down on the numerous Stanford 3-point threats.
“Tara told me she was pretty sure they weren’t going to double me, so we knew immediately that we were going to go inside,” Appel said of the approach heading into the Elite Eight rematch. “That was our game plan from the very beginning.”
On March 30, 2009 my daughter, Sydney Beau, was a precocious 18-month-old child who had already grown accustomed to her dad’s many day adventures, both inside and outside of the daily realm of a working parent. With mommy Sysha busy after her senior year of college at the Academy of Art, Sydney and I bonded through my ability to bring her with me during the work day, as I filed—and served–legal papers for a number of San Francisco attorneys.
All weekend leading to Monday the 30th I knew the 6pm tip time to see Iowa State-Stanford in Berkeley (of all places!) would be challenging after a 9am-5pm work day. And I knew that Sydney Beau would be along for the ride, and the adventure. Our key, third component—Syd’s do-it-all stroller—would miss the trip to Berkeley due to crowded, rush hour BART trains that would undoubtedly test Sydney and daddy’s patience.
I attended my first women’s basketball game in 1980. Within a month I saw Machine Gun Molly Bolin of the WBL, Nancy Lieberman and USF’s All-American Mary Hile play in person. To see both games, I traveled fewer than 15 blocks from my house. It was as if the women’s game had come by my house looking for me. At San Francisco’s Civic Auditorium, Bolin wowed me with her pull-up jumpers in transition that seem to settle in the rim as if she had the basketball on a tether. In that 1980 season, Bolin would establish records for points in a game (55) and average points per game (32.8). Just 23 years old, Bolin had polish on her game that few of her competitors could match.
Lieberman, a college player at Old Dominion, was better known than Bolin. She developed quite a reputation in Queens for playing with the boys and schooling them as a teenager on the New York hard courts. It wasn’t until she was a high school sophomore that she settled into competing against other high school girls and teams she would dominate. Lieberman’s story appeared in the Chronicle in the days leading to her appearance at USF to face Hile and the Lady Dons. I read it and knew I had to get parental clearance to ride the bus alone at night—maybe for the first time–and see the game.
Hile is simply the greatest women’s basketball player ever with a San Francisco background. As a prep, she developed as a Jill of all trades, playing four sports at her Sunnyvale, CA high school. But once she landed at the University of San Francisco, Hile settled into rewriting the record book by scoring 2,324 points and grabbing 1,602 rebounds in her four years on the Hilltop. Her records still stand, and her point total is greater than Bill Russell, K.C. Jones and Bill Cartwright, the better-known men basketballers that played at USF.
Unfortunately, January 9, 1980 didn’t live up to the billing. With Lieberman and future Olympian Anne Donovan forming an incredible duo, USF was left by the side of the road on its biggest night of women’s hoops ever. The Monarchs ran away and hid, winning 70-46. But I was forever changed, wanting to see what great women’s players I could run into next.
Five years after Old Dominion tore up San Francisco, coach Wendy Larry and the Monarchs were still at it. Led by Medina Dixon and Tracy Claxton, Old Dominion captured the 1985 NCAA Tournament, winning 70-65 over Georgia in the championship game. Along the way to the title, ODU got past Ohio State in the East Regional final, winning 72-68. That would be the last game Tara VanDerveer would coach at Ohio State. In a stroke of genius, athletic director Andy Geiger convinced the 31-year old VanDerveer to leave OSU for Stanford, which at the time was coming off a 9-19 season and playing in front of 300 fans a night.
“My dad told me I was crazy to take this job. He said, ‘You’ll be unemployed and coming home to live with us in three months’,” VanDerveer recalled.
VanDerveer captured her first national title at Stanford, winning it all in 1990. Then again in 1992, Stanford was crowned champion. VanDerveer was well on her way to turning a three-month, crash-and-burn job into the most superior 38 years of college coaching the sport had ever seen.
Stanford’s 2007-08 team didn’t come out of nowhere. I know. Now 22 seasons into my love affair with VanDerveer’s basketball dynasty, I’d already seen more great players than I could ever imagine. Starting with Jennifer Azzi, VanDerveer rolled out All-Americans seemingly two and three at a time. I saw Val Whiting, Kate Starbird, Rachel Hemmer, Olympia Scott, Kristin Folkl, Lindsey Yamasaki, Nicole Powell and Candice Wiggins all play in person at Maples Pavilion, right in the middle of Stanford’s sprawling campus. I caught the train, drove, and rode my bike to Palo Alto. By any means I had to see Stanford play and VanDerveer coach. To this day, I’m not sure if I’ve ever seen Stanford lose in person. Maybe once? I’m not sure, but for the purposes of this story, I’ve been to 65 Stanford games in person, and seen them win every time. Amazing.
That 2008 team featuring Wiggins, VanDerveer’s self-proclaimed favorite player to ever receive her coaching, broke the dry spell as Stanford qualified for the Final Four. But local high school McDonald’s All-American Appel, Kayla Pedersen, Ros Gold-Onwude, Jillian Harmon and Jeanette Pohlen were also on that team as non-seniors. Subsequently, Stanford started the 2008-09 under the hardly mysterious, absolutely attention-grabbing moniker of “loaded.”
Sydney and I were destined to be a sports consuming father-daughter duo from the start. My father, Morris Jr. and I bonded over our frequent attendance at Stanford and Cal football games, Giants games, and the A’s. In fact, my father took me to four World Series games between 1972 and 1974 at the Coliseum and in Los Angeles for the first A’s-Dodgers World Series.
Sydney had been to games previously, but on both occasions with Sysha with us as well. Too young to actually watch a game, Syd was content to sit on one of our laps, watch, and listen to all that was going on around her. While oblivious, my child was already on the fast track, having “watched” Stanford play at home in the NCAA Tournament (March 24, 2008 vs. UTEP) and experienced Sacred Heart Cathedral’s No. 1 nationally-ranked high school girls team (January 2008) in their home gym.
I can’t say that Sydney ever became a fan of the game. Now 16 years old, she’s a surfer, a swimmer, and a student. My deceased father would scratch his head knowing that his grandchild’s high school football team won a California state championship, played 15 games, and she didn’t attend any of them. But ultimately, none of that matters. She’s our child, we love her and support any healthy activities she wants to pursue.
Not only did Tara VanDerveer predict that Iowa State would leave Jayne Appel one-on-one in the paint on March 30, 2009, she also felt the result would be a 50-point night for her star player with the game being played just 19 miles from Appel’s high school in Concord, CA. Drake’s Lori Baumann holds the record for individual scoring in the NCAA Tournament with a 50-point game in 1982, and Sheryl Swoopes is second with a 47-point game in 1993. The normally tight-lipped VanDerveer kept tight-lipped, mentioning her forecast only to Appel minutes before the game tipped off. I walked into the arena that night, unaware of what the Stanford sideline had in store. An NCAA-record scoring performance in an Elite Eight game was a lot, even in 2009, some 15 years prior to the Caitlin Clark supernova striking planet Earth.
But almost immediately, that’s exactly what transpired. Appel scored 27 points in the first half, made 13 shots, missed just six, and outscored Iowa State single handedly. In her junior year season, Big Jayne was injury free, in top condition, and way too nimble with her feet, arms, and hands to be contained. An All-American on her best night, she blew past her previous high that season of 29 points by scoring the first six points of the second half, and the rout was on. With 46 points, 16 rebounds in 35 minutes on the floor, Appel settled into third place on the Tournament game scoring list, a spot she still holds today.
“I wasn’t concerned about how many points [Appel] scored,” Iowa State coach Bill Fennelly said. “Our plan was to make 10 or 11 3’s, and take away the 3 from them.”
“I came into the gym with the mind-set that I wasn’t going to leave without the net,” Appel said of the 74-53 victory. “We weren’t going to leave here without cutting down those nets. It just wasn’t an option.”
Sydney didn’t know Jayne Appel was having a big night. Sydney was having a big night. First of all, she looked great in a billowing, red dress with tights underneath. As soon as we arrived at the game (fashionably 20 minutes late), the compliments started, as my daughter loved being around 9,000 other people, many realizing what a dashing 18-month old child could be. In exchange for the compliments, she put on a show, prancing in several directions at once, unconstrained by me or her stroller. I knew my daughter, I could keep an eye on her and the game. So I thought…
Once we settled into an area of the bleachers behind one of the baskets that allowed us appropriate space for a daddy-daughter combo, I was immediately on alert. Sydney, I later found out, had napped much of the day while I was at work. That following a big breakfast, and preceding her entrance at the game. My beautiful daughter started climbing in and through the bleachers at a furious pace, not caring about messing up her clothes.
Quickly, I positioned myself to grab her at any moment. People were watching me, and both of us, as I played a dangerous game of sports fan and parent trying to prevent my child from falling through the bleachers into the metal supports and hardwood below. I’m sure some watching thought I was foolish enough to let Sydney harm herself.
I wasn’t that foolish.
While Appel racked up the points, I just stopped watching. Thanks to Tara VanDerveer, I’d never been at a Stanford game and worried about them possibly losing. So the crowd, heavily populated with Stanford fans, let me know that things were going well, and I just focused on Sydney.
So on the night Big Jayne Appel scored a Stanford-record 46 points, I probably saw her score 18. I’m okay with that, I got a lifetime memory instead.
Sports Radio Service 