Bigger than basketball: Tara VanDerveer launches Stanford class

Decorated former women’s basketball coach Tara VanDerveer launched her first academic class, “Basketball: A Masterclass,” on Jan. 14, to an overflowing room of Stanford Continuing Studies students. 

Despite teaching hundreds of players on the basketball court throughout her 45-year career as a coach before her retirement earlier this year, this was VanDerveer’s first time behind the lectern. With 1,216 career collegiate wins, three national championships and a gold medal under her belt from her stint as head coach of the 1996 Olympic team, VanDerveer has cemented her legacy on the court. Now, as a lecturer, she adds yet another title to her resume. 

“Tara is a legendary coach, it’s obvious,” said Wendell Birkhofer, ’78, MBA ’87, a Continuing Studies student. “This class is a great chance to learn from a legend.” 

“Basketball: A Masterclass” is the highest enrolled Continuing Studies sports class, with around 100 students enrolled in-person and over 400 online, according to Nate Boswell, assistant dean of Stanford Continuing Studies. The readings for the course are uploaded onto Canvas, which gives students the opportunity to study the history of the sport outside of the classroom. 

“When an institution like Stanford supports a person like Tara, then good things happen,” Boswell said. “The course sort of mirrors Tara’s significance for the evolution of women’s sports.”

The Continuing Studies Program was launched in 1988 to the general public as a means to share the educational resources at Stanford. Today, the program has more than 17,000 learners taking courses in liberal arts and sciences, wellness and health, creative writing and professional development, according to their website. 

Within minutes, VanDerveer had the class laughing. She began her two-hour class with anecdotes about the birth of basketball as a sport and her own athletic career, highlighting her first gameday apparel as a player — a wool tunic — and how there was no varsity team for her in high school. VanDerveer transitioned to spotlighting the passage of Title IX in 1972, which prohibits sex discrimination in education programs that receive federal funding. She emphasized how far women’s basketball has come since its debut, noting that the first Amateur Athletic Union (AAU) tournament for girls, in 1926, featured a beauty pageant. 

VanDerveer’s course will feature prominent figures in basketball, including Golden State Warriors’ head coach Steve Kerr and current Stanford women’s basketball head coach Kate Paye ’95 J.D. ’03 MBA ’03. In the first class session, Judith Sweet, the first woman to be elected president of the NCAA, was the guest speaker. 

Sweet described fighting for parity between women’s and men’s athletics and implored the class to reflect on women’s basketball’s development since its inception. Sweet recounted that in her first year as athletic director at UC San Diego in 1975, the women’s basketball team had a meager $1,000 budget. 

“Basketball really is a reflection of our modern-day society and how far we’ve come from the pre-Title IX days of the women’s suffrage movement,” Poindexter-McHan said. “There are… 400 plus people signed up for this course. Seeing how big those numbers are show that people are interested in learning more about it. And that’s credit to Tara and that’s credit to all the women that have come through the Stanford Women’s Basketball program.”

For VanDerveer, learning is something that never stops. “Always do your homework,” she said. Whether she’s playing the piano, cheering on the Cardinal or creating the syllabus for her course on the history of women’s basketball, a retired VanDerveer still finds time to get her homework done. 

“I think that that is such a big piece of her greatness. She’s not just learning for herself, she’s learning so she can leave a legacy for others,” Poindexter-McHan said. “The fact that she’s doing this is really to give back and to educate people.” 

In VanDerveer’s eyes, there is nothing more rewarding than teaching others about the sport while underscoring that life is bigger than basketball. She emphasized that for her, coaching is a role of “unconditional love” — it’s about the love for something greater than yourself. 

There are no mandatory assignments in the class — the goal of the course is to learn. With this philosophy, in response to a student’s question about how to be a good coach, VanDerveer had no hesitation — “Always keep it fun.” 

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