Tara VanDerveer thought that upon finishing her playing career at Indiana University in 1975, she would eventually apply to law school. She took the ensuing months to weigh what could be next. For a time, she sailed competitively in South Carolina. She refereed volleyball matches in Florida. By Christmas, though, she ran out of money and returned home to Niagara Falls, N.Y., and lived in her parents’ basement. She spent many afternoons playing chess with her brother, Nick.
“What are you doing?” her father, Dunbar, once asked her.
“Well, nothing,” she responded.
Dunbar suggested she help coach her sister Marie’s high school basketball team, a notion VanDerveer met with some initial resistance. Marie, Tara said, “wasn’t into basketball,” at least not the way she was. VanDerveer’s childhood love for the sport, as she put it in her 1997 autobiography, was similar to the “visceral way you love a painting or a piece of music.”
VanDerveer had the notion in the back of her mind that coaching may be an option. Doing so at this moment would also allow her to stay with her parents. “I went down there and I really had fun,” she said.
Instead of filling out law school applications, VanDerveer wrote to 20 colleges inquiring about a graduate assistant or assistant…
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