Tara VanDerveer's first head coaching job was in Idaho

In 1978, a twenty-five-year-old assistant coach took the head coaching job at the University of Idaho. She had never run a program before. She stayed two seasons.

Forty-six years later she retired as the winningest women's basketball coach in NCAA Division I history at the time, with 1,216 career wins, three national championships, an Olympic gold medal, and a place in the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame.

Almost nobody in Idaho knows the first part.

The part of the résumé that gets skipped

Tara VanDerveer's career is usually told as a Stanford story, and reasonably so — she was there for thirty-eight years. The Ohio State years get a mention. Idaho tends to disappear entirely, which is what happens to a first job that lasted two seasons in a state most sportswriters were not covering.

But a first head coaching job is where somebody finds out whether they can do the thing at all. Everything after Idaho was built on top of two seasons in Moscow, and the state has never really claimed them.

We think it should.

Then she came back

On February 4, 2026, she gave the keynote at the first Change Make*Hers Gala at the Stueckle Sky Center in Boise. It was a first-year event, run by a foundation two years old, in a state she left in 1980.

She did not have to say yes. She said yes.

That evening she received the Legacy of Impact Award, presented by four women who had played for her at Stanford — Jill Yanke, Trisha Stevens Lamb, Ann Enthoven, and our own co-founder Angela Taylor, who walked on to her team in 1989 and earned a scholarship two months later. Dawn Staley narrated the tribute film.

Afterwards she told the Idaho Press something that has stayed with us. The event was great, she said, but what was better was the purpose of it.

That is a remarkable thing for a keynote speaker to say about the evening built around her, and it is the reason we have quoted it on three pages since.

Why we keep bringing this up

There is a version of this post that is about a famous person attending our event. That version is not worth writing.

The one worth writing is this: a coach who became one of the most decorated figures in American sport started in Idaho, and the state largely does not know it. Meanwhile there are girls in Idaho right now who assume that the interesting version of a sporting life happens somewhere else — that the pipeline starts in California or Connecticut and Idaho is somewhere you leave.

It is not true, and VanDerveer's own résumé is the counter-example. So is Kristin Armstrong, three Olympic golds and a University of Idaho graduate. So is Muffy Davis, a Paralympic champion out of Sun Valley. So is Kaya Evans, who grew up in Pocatello, captained soccer at the College of Idaho, and is now a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford.

Four people, all Idaho, all of whom were in one room in Boise in February. There was a girls' soccer team in the audience that night, watching.

Tara VanDerveer acknowledges the student-athletes seated among the guests, February 4, 2026

What we cannot tell you

We do not know whether any girl in that room went home and thought differently about what was available to her. We have not asked them, we have no way to measure it, and we are not going to claim it happened.

What we can tell you is that it is the entire reason we seat student-athletes among the guests rather than at the side of the room — and that it costs $750 to sponsor a table of them.

One correction, while we are here

Tara VanDerveer was the winningest coach in NCAA Division I basketball history when she retired in 2024. Geno Auriemma has since passed her.

We mention it because we would rather be accurate than impressive, and because getting this particular fact wrong is common enough that it is worth saying out loud.

The 2027 Change Make*Hers Gala is on February 10 at Boise Centre West. See what the first one looked like →