Editor’s Note: This story is included in The Athletic’s Best of 2021. View the full list.
Six-point-one seconds stood between Stanford and its third national title.
As Tara VanDerveer gathered her team in a huddle, that a championship was on the line was not discussed. The message was not about the trophy or the confetti or the Hall of Fame coach finally crossing the finish line for a third time. It was not about the Cardinal’s 54-53 lead or even their opponent, Arizona.
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It was about the team. Their team.
“This is the last six seconds you have as a team,” she said. “So, you want to leave it all out there.”
This season was never a given. As VanDerveer set out on the unexpected journey, she constantly reminded her players they’d need to be flexible.
When COVID-19 restrictions hit Santa Clara County one week into the season, prohibiting all contact sports, that practice in flexibility began. VanDerveer told players to pack for a week or two ahead of what would be the opening leg of a 63-night expedition away from home. For weeks, Stanford lived out of hotels, players only able to return to their dorm rooms on occasion, and never to spend the night. They flew more than 7,500 miles, became experts in the art of packing an efficient suitcase and bounced from city to city en route to a Pac-12 title and the No. 1 overall seed in this NCAA Tournament.
When the tournament bubble began in San Antonio, Stanford was prepared. It had spent nearly its entire season in a bubble on the road. In some ways, staying put in one city was easier.
Their season had taught them a lot about one another.
They knew Haley Jones’ Starbucks order. They knew that Cameron Brink was a good illustrator, that you should never let the Hull twins be together when playing Code Names, that Ashten Prechtel grew up playing card games. They knew the kind of Netflix shows Kiana Williams and Anna Wilson would pick if given the opportunity, and that Hannah Jump was a better ping-pong player than anyone else in a Stanford uniform.
But mostly, they knew they wanted to play together for as long as they possibly could. And with only 6.1 seconds remaining together as a team, that was their driving force.
When Aari McDonald’s potential buzzer-beater shot went up, Haley Jones was positioned on the block. She saw that the Cardinal had three players guarding the tournament’s breakout star as she launched a turnaround 3-point attempt.
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The clock expired before the ball hit the back of the rim and bounced into the paint. By that point, Jones was sprinting toward her team’s bench.
They had done it. This Stanford team would get the trophy and the confetti. They had won their Hall of Fame coach her third national championship.
So Jones was running toward her team.
This season was never going to be typical.
And rightfully so, the pieces of Stanford’s national championship were built in the most atypical of places.
This championship was built in an outdoor swimming pool on Stanford’s campus where, every Monday, Wednesday and Friday this season, VanDerveer would slip into a lane around 7 a.m. Beside her, Olympians and Olympic hopefuls would lap the 67-year-old as she steadily went back and forth from end to end.
For an hour, give or take, she’d glide through the water, holding her own in her lane at the edge of the pool. An avid water skier, VanDerveer had always found the water to be cathartic, but as she approached her 34th year at the helm of the Stanford program, she considered it even more important.
Stanford swimmers grew accustomed to seeing VanDerveer show up in the mornings, helping to pull the tarps off the pool as they all started their days.
“I would watch their games on TV when they were on the road and then she would be there the next morning,” said Stanford swimmer Brooke Forde, an 11-time All-American. “I’m like, weren’t you just in a different place across the country? And she’s like, yes, but I had to come get my swim in.”
During the days, VanDerveer would preach flexibility to her players. But coming into this expectedly chaotic season, there was a necessity to the predictability of those quiet mornings.
This championship season was also built in high school and community college gymnasiums and in the Golden State Warriors facility, as the Cardinal searched anywhere and everywhere for space to practice. As the nomadic team’s trip grew longer and longer, VanDerveer would discreetly reach out to local teams to see if there was any chance her team, a potential title contender, could use their gym as a practice court.
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In Scotts Valley, Calif., Stanford utilized a high school court that had only two glass backboards and a handful of wooden backboards. One practice, the gym had no electricity or heat, but the Cardinal charged forward, practicing in the dark and the cold.
“I think it made us grittier,” Brink said. “We’re just thankful we had a gym to practice in. We’re thankful for the people opening it up for us. And it made us tougher. … I feel like those practices are a big reason why we’re here today.”
And this title was built in front of empty seats and in eerily quiet gyms. It was in front of just 30 people that VanDerveer surpassed Pat Summitt as the sport’s winningest coach on Dec. 15. As the rebound from the final shot of the game bounced to Pacific coach Bradley Davis, he walked to center court and handed the ball to VanDerveer. Throughout the week, Stanford and Pacific had discussed ways to commemorate the milestone if it happened on that day (the Cardinal had always been respectful enough to not outwardly assume they would win), and the game ball seemed like an obvious tribute for win No. 1,099.
As the team celebrated the milestone in an empty arena, senior Kiana Williams presented to VanDerveer a large, black fleece sweatshirt with “T-Dawg” stitched on the back. VanDerveer had seen these types of sweatshirts sported by the Stanford swimmers every morning when she arrived at the pool. She had mentioned them on occasion to members of her staff and the basketball team. So when the team considered what to gift VanDerveer when she made history, the sweatshirt became the obvious pick.
“She started wearing it to the pool after that,” Forde said. “We did notice that.”
The team had a special gift for "T-Dawg" 😂🐐#TaraAtTheTop | #GoStanford pic.twitter.com/vE1tSDV1qL
— Stanford Women’s Basketball (@StanfordWBB) December 16, 2020
And ultimately, this title was won in a bubble in San Antonio, in a gym at 17 percent capacity during a pandemic. The Alamodome, where the Cardinal would cut down the nets, is 12 miles from Willams’ family home. She graduated high school in that gym and, four years later, she showered herself in confetti there with 11 teammates who had fought through a COVID-19 season and the final 6.1 seconds against Arizona with her.
Perhaps the most fascinating part of Stanford’s national title run is the ways in which this most unprecedented year still managed to rhyme with history.
The tournament began with the exposed discrepancies between the men’s and the women’s NCAA bubbles. VanDerveer, who attended a high school that didn’t have a girls basketball team, has grown up in this world and this sport speaking up for women. She was a starter for Indiana’s basketball team when Title IX passed in 1972, and she has become a mentor for dozens of female coaches in the industry today.
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And her voice was one that resounded most loudly when she spoke out against the NCAA and its treatment of the women’s basketball players.
“Women athletes and coaches are done waiting,” she wrote in a statement, “not just for upgrades of a weight room, but for equity in every facet of life.”
On the court, she faced familiar opponents.
In the Final Four, the Cardinal defeated a Dawn Staley-led South Carolina team. Thirty-one years earlier, in VanDerveer’s run to the 1990 national title, Stanford drew a Virginia team led by Staley the player in the Final Four. Staley finished with 18 points that game and would go on to be coached by VanDerveer on Team USA during the 1996 Olympics. And when Staley got her first coaching offer at Temple in 2000, VanDerveer was one of her first calls.
In this year’s national title game, the Cardinal defeated an Adia Barnes-led Arizona team. In the ’90s, VanDerveer beat Adia Barnes the player and Arizona eight times (the one time a Barnes player-led Arizona won in the ’90s was on a buzzer-beater).
VanDerveer might not have imagined all of this happening in between her first and most recent title runs — to face players-turned-coaches requires a certain amount of longevity, success and luck that not everyone receives — but it has been ensured by the way she has built this Stanford program.
Ahead of her first national title, she told reporters, “Stanford is not an average school. I’m not an average coach. And I don’t want this to be an average program.”
At the time, she was in her fifth year at the helm of the program. The year before she arrived, the Cardinal had gone 9-19. People had warned her against taking the job, curious why she’d leave Ohio State and the Big Ten for such a place, but she went anyway.
She has seen the Pac-12 rise — first from the Pac-10 to the Pac-12, and then from the worst power conference to the best in the country. Nowhere was that more evident than on Sunday night, as two Pac-12 opponents faced off for the national title.
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She has sustained her program’s success as the rest of her conference surged — aided by improved non-conference scheduling and a Pac-12 Network that has aired more Pac-12 games than any other TV network.
“It’s one thing to rise to the top of the mountain, but it’s a whole lot harder to sustain,” UCLA coach Cori Close said. “You can have a real flash in the pan, but to do it over and over again, and then to evolve with the game, then to reinvent yourself, to adjust to all the changing landscapes that are going on …
“That’s what makes Tara elite.”
She has won conference and national titles when the Pac-12 was considered “Stanford and the Eleven Dwarves” and when it was considered the nation’s best. She has won conference and national titles as a young coach, and she has won conference and national titles as a coach some look at and wonder how many years she has left.
“This program is what it is because of Tara,” Jones said. “Just being able to be recruited by her and now be a part of the team and then take that a step further and win a national championship after the 29-year-long drought, it’s just a blessing. … So many great players have passed through this program and they’ve all come for the same reason that we have — to be coached by the greatest to develop you, not only as a player, but just as a person, as a young woman.
“I think it’s just an honor, really, to do this for her and with her.”
There were times this season when VanDerveer would yell at Jones, the Cardinal’s leading scorer, for not crashing the offensive boards hard enough.
Jones had a good excuse: She always thought it was going in.
That mentality was Stanford’s biggest strength this season. It had a level of depth few other teams did. From the start of the season, VanDerveer loved to say that “Kiana was key” to everything this team did on the floor, but the key was that everyone could be key.
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Williams could have a 25-point night, but so too could Lexie Hull. Williams was the breakout offensive star in the early rounds of the tournament before Jones’ versatility became impossible for opponents to contain. On the defensive end, the 6-foot-5 Brink became an even greater weapon and shot blocker.
Through the regular season, the Cardinal had six players have single-game scoring highs. In the NCAA Tournament, four players stepped up as leading scorers for Stanford. There wasn’t one star. There was one (very difficult-to-stop) team.
“That’s what we hung our hats on all year long — every game someone different stepped up,” Williams said. “We really hang our hats on relying on one another.”
They saw this journey through the lens of being a unit, a team that had lived together on the road for so much of the year. VanDerveer had preached that bad fouls weren’t just silly, they were selfish. If fouls put a good player on the bench, it wasn’t just hurting the player, it was hurting the team.
And in a season where the team had sacrificed so much, there was no room for selfishness.
By January, VanDerveer wondered how long this team could really live and play on the road, if it was really worth it to go on in this way.
But the team knew it was. The players were building the foundation of something special. When a player or coach couldn’t pull her weight on any given day, others stepped in. The stakes felt higher, and that was evident with every mile they flew together, every night they spent away from their homes, every step they took to get closer to a place where all the sacrifices would be worth it.
“In the end, changing our routine of what it used to be like to what we did, we really grew closer as a group,” Hull said. “And we really built a lot of trust and love for each other that, yes, we definitely would have had if we could return to our normal routine, but it just really grew a lot more because of the circumstances we were in.”
When the players returned to campus in September ahead of this season, they did something un-Stanford-like: They broke the rules.
After all the players tested negative for COVID-19 upon arriving in Palo Alto, they decided to break their five-day quarantines on day four to go to a gym off-campus and play pickup basketball.
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When VanDerveer found out, Williams said she was “heartbroken.”
It was a reality check for the players — that this virus was real and serious and there were people, like their 67-year-old coach, for whom it might be even more dangerous. There was a recognition that every individual risk taken was a threat not only to their season, but also to their basketball family. There was an acknowledgment that they were going to have to give up certain pieces of their life if they wanted to have a season.
And while they didn’t know then what they know now — namely, that they would spend close to 100 nights in a hotel room this season — that understanding bonded this team.
Williams said she and fellow seniors — Wilson and Alyssa Jerome — took their roles as leaders more seriously. If they wanted to preserve their senior pregame meetings with VanDerveer, if they wanted a chance at a special year, they needed to ensure that they, and every other player on the Stanford roster, followed the rules no matter how difficult.
And Williams, who internalized that guilt a bit harder, made a resolution.
“I felt like the only way to make up for that was to win a national championship for her,” Williams said.
Williams made good on her promise. In perhaps a fitting end to this season, in a game Williams didn’t play her best, her teammates stepped up. And after nearly 100 nights on the road, and 7,500 miles in the course of a few months, this team brought a national championship back to Stanford.
As Williams walked back to the locker room, a national championship basketball net draped over her shoulders, she saw her Hall of Fame coach off camera.
“We did it, T-Dawg,” Williams said.
“We did,” VanDerveer responded.
(Illustration: Wes McCabe / The Athletic; Photo: Elsa / Getty)
