One day in the ninth grade, Tara VanDerveer was playing basketball — as she did most days while growing up in upstate New York — when her father interrupted the bounce, bounce, bounce of the ball and ordered her into the house. He wanted her to work on what he viewed as a less trivial pursuit: her math homework.

“Basketball is never going to take you anywhere,” he told her.

VanDerveer would never talk back to her father, but privately she stewed.

“Algebra,” she thought, “is never going to take me anywhere.”

That infatuation with the round orange ball, which has lasted a lifetime, has taken VanDerveer many places: around the world (from where she would drop her father postcards), across the country to Stanford University for the last 35 years and into the Basketball Hall of Fame.

On Tuesday night, it carried her to an even more rarefied place, when a 104-61 victory by top-ranked Stanford at Pacific gave VanDerveer the record for most coaching wins in women’s college basketball, moving her past Pat Summitt’s 1,098 career victories, all for the University of Tennessee.

Source: New York Times

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