Editor’s Note: This story is included in The Athletic’s Best of 2022. View the full list.
NORTHERN MINNESOTA — Tara VanDerveer leans back in her Adirondack chair, dogs Enzo and Piper asleep at her feet. She gets quiet, folds her arms and squints past the birch and pine trees as the sun drops toward the tree line across the lake. Pulling out her phone, she confirms what she already knew — the wind, currently breezing at around 4 mph, should fall to 1 to 2 mph in the next hour.
“Perfect,” she says.
She puts the dogs inside the cabin; they press their noses against the picture windows facing the lake. They’re her only real audience here, and she likes it that way.
VanDerveer, 69, retrieves a wetsuit and pink life jacket from the clothesline and heads into the sauna to change. When she emerges, she still looks like the country’s winningest women’s basketball coach but also, nothing at all like her. There is, of course, the iconic bob haircut, and perhaps it should come as no surprise that anything she does, she commits to thoroughly (hence, the wetsuit). But her energy radiates like everyone else on the water, the lake junkies who live for these nights with perfect ski conditions, the people who love (truly love) their boats.
She bought this cabin shortly after…
