Ratto: Hall of Fame small consolation to VanDerveer

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April 4, 2011RATTO ARCHIVESTANFORD PAGERay Ratto
CSNBayArea.com

It is good for Tara VanDerveer on this, the day of her induction into the Basketball Hall of Fame, that she won two national titles before she became the current model of Marv Levy.

After Sundays gut-gnawing (at least for her and the Stanford womens basketball team) loss to Texas A&M in the Final Four semifinal, she became one of the very few coaches in any sport to string four consecutive thanks-for-coming-and-drive-home-safelies on the games biggest stage. In a year in which womens basketball decided to try a round of the meek inheriting the earth, Stanford apparently wasnt meek enough.

This is a switch from past practice, in which Stanford was not quite strong enough, mostly to Connecticut. But UConn was reloading, Tennessee hasnt quite recovered from its late '90s hiccup, and the game is broadening to include, well, eight really good teams instead of the usual four, or even more often, two.
RELATED: Stanford upset by Texas A&M in Final Four

Either way, this Stanford class will be remembered outside its immediate circle of supporters as the team that almosted itself to death, and VanDerveer as the superb coach with no titles in 20 years.

At least it would be that way if womens basketball operated in the same cutthroat what-have-you-done-for-me-in-the-last-40-minutes as most sports. The generally accepted rule is that if you dont hold a trophy, you have failed, and when you get this close this many times, you enter a very rarefied world -- that of The Best Coach Never To Have Won It All.

VanDerveer avoided that nightmare, the one that consumed Dean Smith and Roy Williams and Jim Boeheim, with her titles in 1990 and 1992, before the womens game multiplied exponentially. She never got the full Marv Levy, named for the Buffalo Bills coach who led four straight Buffalo Bills teams to Super Bowl defeats and never won one.

VanDerveer got the skins on the wall that helped propel her to the Hall of Fame, and properly so. With them, the rest of her resume makes perfect sense for the Hall. Without even one of them, it is hard to see her being a finalist because Hall of Fame coaches without titles are exceedingly rare. See Sloan, Jerry, for a glimpse of the entire field.

Nevertheless, its been a long time since that last championship, and the last four years have been a particularly gruesome tease. They could say that they werent by rights the best team in 2008, 2009 or 2010, but they knew they were this time, and still couldnt finish, this time to a team that has never been in a discussion about elite womens programs before.

And while it is usual around these parts to see Van Derveer for what she has done instead of what she hasnt, it is probably a comfort she would not have been afforded in many other places, or in many other sports. We tend toward the mean in sports, which is to say that reputation is a fairly binary state. You win, or you have some 'splainin to do, to quote the old philosopher Desi Arnaz.

And because she has avoided that kind of hard-edged scrutiny, so have her players, who are remembered largely as players who accomplished rather than as those who did not. The Kayla Petersen-Nneka-Ogwumike-Jeanette Pohlen teams have to live with a pit in their stomachs about never having finished the deal, but they will not be cuffed about by others. It isnt how things roll at Stanford, or in womens basketball. There is still too much building to do to flirt with the process of deconstruction.

VanDerveer, though, must wonder in her quieter times how her career has played out in such an odd way. She isnt Brad Stevens, the Butler coach currently on everyones cool list, because she had game before she got to Stanford, and won her first title at 37, in her 12th year at a Division I school. Stevens, as we all know, is 12, and has been coaching for 13 months.

In other words, her career has had a normal buildup as these things go, two spikes in the early middle, but only a high plateau since then. No other coach has been as close as many times, and no other coach has been considered at the top of her game without actually being at the top of the game.

Regrets have been few and fairly minor, even if they seem like catastrophes today. There is truth in the implied value of the runner-up, and VanDerveer need not apologize when her name is called today.

Yet at this stage, at this time of her life, at 57, with miles still to go, she may also be known, erroneously yet accurately when you remember that we dont do history as a culture any more, as The Best Coach Never To Have Won The Big One Even After She Won It Twice. Hard to see how that will fit on the Hall of Fame plaque.

But at least shell have one.

Ray Ratto is a columnist for CSNBayArea.com

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