Sorry it has been awhile since we wrote a blog (apologies to good friend P). Just, we’re on summer vacation and Twitter is so much easier to blurt out somethin’ short and silly. Or just retweet what others say so we don’t have to think of anything original. (We got our chops busted for that recently!). However, it is fun to follow what those youngster Stanford players are saying and doing. Keeps us young, too, and Goodness knows we could use some of that youth elixir!
Anyhoo, Stanford University Women’s Basketball Coach Tara VanDerveer is set to be inducted into the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame this Friday, August 12th. Stanford is doing their best to promote the heck out of it, and we surely appreciate that. So check out the special Tara VanDerveer page they created. It will chronicle her 32 years and counting of coaching, one “that has featured Olympic Gold, NCAA titles, conference titles, and national coach of the year honors.” (Don’t forget the 800+ college wins!) The page also includes the “bittersweet” morning when she found out about the HOF induction, that day in April last year right after her team was eliminated in teh Final Four by Texas Tech.
Highlights of the page include pictures of Tara throughout the decades. The first installment features pictures form the 1970’s and C for one is glad to see the tall socks. So cool, so retro, so ahead or behind the times, C can’t take her eyes off them! Probably because they remind C of her basketball playing days (and how the high stirrup socks would slip out of her Converses because she had flat feet and no arch to anchor them to her feet!). But we digress…
Keep checking back to the page to get more photos throughout the decades and other goodies. Oh, there has been a call through social media to publish “Tara-isms.” Those are sayings only Tara could come up with to “teach” (torture) a player. Such as the one Tara told Jillian Harmon on her first day wearing a Stanford uniform. “Jill, this isn’t prayer basketball. We don’t just throw the ball in the air and pray someone will catch it!” And Jillian has also shared this classic about being on the wrong side of a screen. “Jill, don’t be a squirrel on the wrong side of a tree!”
Or this one remembered by Ros Gold-Onwude and JJ Hones; “They already made the movie ‘Dumb and Dumber’ and you’re NOT in it!” Ros had many memories of Tara-isms such as: “Don’t be a pig and hog the ball” and “LESS is More.” To all point guards everywhere: “What offense are you running? Mumbo Jumbo?!!! Be a point guard! Run the play!”
To quote Ros Gold Onwude again, “Along with basketball genius, she’s said a lot of funny things over the years.” And won a lot of games. And mentored a lot of young women. And is going to the Hall. Congrats to the one and only TVD!
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