Tara VanDerveer sat in on Bob Knight’s Indiana men’s basketball practices when she was a student-athlete at IU in the ’70s.
She’s now the winningest coach in college basketball history.
No. 6 Stanford women’s basketball’s 65-56 win over Oregon State on Sunday was VanDerveer’s 1,203rd, surpassing Duke legend Mike Krzyzweski’s record in men’s college basketball. VanDerveer set the record for the women’s game in December 2020.
VanDerveer has coached at Stanford since 1985, and boasts a .818 winning percentage across her 45 years as a college head coach. She spent two years at Idaho and five at Ohio State before joining the Cardinal.
VanDerveer played for Indiana women’s basketball from 1972 through 1975, and she was part of the AIAW Final Four team in 1973. She’s in the IU Athletics Hall of Fame, and the university awarded her a Bicentennial Medal in 2021.
Her Cardinal hosted Indiana in November and delivered the Hoosiers a lopsided loss. Ahead of that game, she told The Daily Hoosier in an email about her pride for her alma mater and her respect for the job Teri Moren has done building up IU women’s basketball.
“I’m a definite, proud alum. Indiana has always had this love affair with basketball and now it’s with women’s basketball, too, and that’s very exciting,” VanDerveer said. told The Daily Hoosier in an email ahead of the game in November. “The numbers of fans they have, the great teams they have. It’s absolutely fantastic and really fun to be riding this wave of support and enthusiasm for women’s basketball.”
VanDerveer and Stanford will play IU at Simon Skjodt Assembly Hall in 2024-25, in the second leg of the home-and-home series that prompted this season’s game. That will be her first game on the sidelines in Bloomington since 1985, when she coached Ohio State.
