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 Tara Van Derveer |
Ken Wong (East Setauket)
Coach VanDerveer, these questions are related to motivation and courtdemeanor. I coached Junior HS teams for 2 seasons. I would pace thesideline during the games. I wonder how you can display calmness during agame regardless of the score? I am reminded of your "comatose on the bench"remark. Was it always like that during your coaching career?
Coach VanDerveer: I try to probably be more animated in practice. I think in the games, ourteam probably needs me to be more calm than to be really animated. I focusbetter when I'm calmer, too. I think I make better decisions.
Christine Gunen (San Jose, CA)
Hey Tara, I love your basketball camps, along with your camp coaches! Butanyways, I just wanted to know, if an athlete has a bad frosh year in HighSchool athletically and academically, would you still consider recruitingthat athlete?
Coach VanDerveer: Actually, Admissions doesn't look at their grades until someone's asophomore. If they have a real good sophomore year, that's when we reallylook at them.
Rochelle Jackson (Stockton, CA)
I was really impressed with your team's performance against Tennessee. Ifyou were to play them again, what would you do differently? Also, theOregon game left me speechless. What did you say to the team duringhalftime? They came back out like it was a new day. Good luck in thepost-season. Your team will definitely be in the tournament.
Coach VanDerveer: Well I hope we have a chance to play Tennessee again. I think, No. 1, we'dhave to play better defense and we'd have to rebound better. But I thoughtwe did a good job running our offense. In key times we didn't handle theirpress, but overall I thought we did a good job. I think we've improved alot and we'd love the chance to play them again. As far as Oregon, we weredown so much. We made such a good comeback in the first half. Basically Ijust told people, "hey, the game is ours, and we just need to go to workfor 20 minutes," and I thought we played very well.
Gloria (Palo Alto, CA)
Milena Flores is so much fun to watch, with her excellent passing andquickness, and consistent effort. I'm surprised that she doesn't seem tolike shooting very much, despite being a good shooter. In her role as pointguard, is she discouraged from taking more shots herself, having more playsrun for her, penetrating into the key, etc? Best of luck to the team inwinning the Pac-10 title and doing well in the NCAA tournament!
Coach VanDerveer: Actually, no, we encourage Milena to shoot. I think she has a really goodshot too, and I think she's shooting the ball really well. Her first job,probably, is to run the offense, but then she does look for her own shotwhen maybe sometimes the offense breaks down, or she's open. We want her totake open shots.
Judy Abbiati (Barre, VT)
Coach VanDerveer: I am a high school basketball coach, running your highpost offense. The kids love the simplicity of it and I love the fact thatit lets them create and play! We run it against both zone, andplayer-player. Was that its intention? It works great. Here's myquestion. How possibile would it be for someone in my position (coachedhigh school for 18 yrs. teaching PE for 10) to move to the college coachinglevel? Basically, all I want to do is spend a season with a good programand learn and learn. It's a big move, but I'd really like to experience thebig time. Any thoughts. I have my Masters Degree in Education. I nevercontinued on..like they suggested...every position for colleges now seem torequire a doctorate.... Okay, one basketball question. I don't have a stalloffense that I like. And I feel like I should heading into our tournamentplay, any thoughts on that??? If you really read this, thanks, and I reallyenjoyed reading your book "Shooting from the Outside." Good Luck the restof the way.
Coach VanDerveer: I'll start with the stall. The stall would be, we call it a spread offense,if they watch our team play. We run spread, where everyone opens up and noone's in the key. They go to the corners and we really break downone-on-one up top, and when someone penetrates, if someone helps, theypitch it and that new person moves to the top spot. A spread offense iseasy, but it is valuable to have toward the end of the game. The otherquestion about going to college, you don't need a doctorate to be incollege coaching. Probably the best way is to work at people's camps thatyou want to get to know. Hiring coaches in college is a who-you-know thing.People are going to hire people that they have confidence in and that theyknow personally and that they can depend on.
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