With #1 Stanford’s 104-61 victory over Pacific on Tuesday night, Stanford head coach Tara VanDerveer became the winningest women’s college basketball coach of all time with 1,099 wins — and counting. A remarkable achievement at an elite private school with difficult academic admissions requirements and no tradition of success in women’s (or men’s) basketball.
Over on the east coast, Duke head coach Mike Krzyzewski continues to add to the win total which makes him the winningest men’s college basketball coach of all time. As I write this, the man known by those who can’t spell as Coach K, has 1,161 career wins.
The two are not thought of as colleagues or even knowing each other, but they do have some things in common — besides their three-syllable last names. Bobby Knight is one of them.
Krzyzewski played for Bobby Knight at Army during the 60s. He was the young Coach Knight’s point guard and captain. After his time on active duty, Mike was an assistant coach for Bobby at Indiana during the 1974-1975 season. That same year, Tara was a senior on the Indiana women’s basketball team. Indiana’s women’s coach at the time, Bea Groton, patterned her team’s style of play after that of Bobby’s men’s team. Tara used to attend the men’s team’s practices to learn what she could from watching Bobby coach. I can’t find any evidence that Tara and Mike knew each other at Indiana, but during that 1974-1975 season, both were learning Bobby Knight’s method of coaching and style of play, and would take those lessons with them to Stanford and Duke.
(This was Bobby Knight at his peak. While his 1974-1975 team was considered by many to be his best, his 1975-1976 team went undefeated and won the national championship — the last men’s college basketball team to pull that off.)
After leaving Indiana, Krzyzewski was the head coach for five years at his alma mater, the U.S. Military Academy, and VanDerveer was the head coach for five years at Bobby Knight’s alma mater, Ohio State. From there, they went on to Duke and Stanford, respectively.
Stanford and Duke are both elite private universities with distinguished academic reputations. Neither is the sort of place where you would expect a head basketball coach to become the most successful ever in their field. Success in college sports depends almost entirely on success in recruiting terrific high school athletes who can be developed into the very best college players. There Krzyzewski enjoyed an important advantage over VanDerveer as Duke’s less rigorous academic standards allowed him to recruit from a far larger pool of high school basketball players than the limited number who had the strong academic credentials required to get admitted to Stanford. Nevertheless, both worked under restrictions that do not hinder coaches at large public universities like Ohio State and Tennessee.
When he started at Duke, Mike did not have much of a men’s basketball tradition to build on. The school had enjoyed some success in the mid-60s under Vic Bubas’ leadership, and again in the 70s when coached by Bill Foster, but Mike has built his own traditions. To the extent we think of Duke as a men’s basketball powerhouse, it’s because of what Mike built.
When Tara was persuaded by athletic director Andy Geiger to leave Ohio State and take the head coaching job at Stanford, she took over a program with no legacy and no history of success. She had friends tell her not to take the Stanford job because Stanford students were too “brainy” to be good at sports. Her own father told her she was “crazy” to take the job, and was bound to fail. She deserves every drop of the credit for turning Stanford into a women’s basketball powerhouse, and racking up a record number of wins.
At Duke, Krzyzewski had his first winning season in year four, and won his first national championship in year eleven. VanDerveer had her first winning season in her third year, and won her first national championship in her fifth year.
Mike is 73 and became Duke’s head coach in 1980. Tara is 67 and started coaching at Stanford in 1985. She took the 1995-1996 season off to coach the U.S. women’s national team to a gold medal in the Atlanta Olympics. So she has six fewer years as a head coach than Mike. Tara’s winning percentage is .812. Mike’s is .767.
Trailing Krzyzewski by 62 wins, VanDerveer would need at least two successful seasons to match his win total. This race to be the winningest of all time regardless of gender will come down to who retires first, and who keeps coaching. But regardless of who ends up with the highest number next to their name, both should be remembered as “the best there ever was.”
