Tara VanDerveer always emphasizes the fundamentals, but her recent stint as head coach of the USA Basketball National Team has given her an even greater appreciation for the basics.
"People ask me where we're based, and I say out of our suitcases," said VanDerveer. "We've logged over 100,000 miles since the beginning of October. We defintely have a lot of frequent flyer mileage, but we're not going to want to use it."
Instead, VanDerveer and Co. will appreciate the drinking water, fresh food, wood floors and warm gyms common to the USA.
"Drinking water -- I mean how basic does it get?" said the 1996 Olympic coach who has spent most of the last seven months living out of one hotel or another. "This is how bad it is sometimes. You're happy when you go to a hotel and there's a washer and a dryer because you have no clean clothes."
VanDerveer has also had her fill of cement and tartan playing surfaces, not to mention challenging competitive environments.
"We'd go to a gym at halftime and I could see my breath," Vanderveer remembered of a few stops that had no heat in the gyms. "You should have seen the steam coming off the players. I said, 'That's it, halftime's over. Go back and warm-up.'"
Of course, warming up can have it's problems in a place like China, where smoking is allowed in the gym and many of the fans smoke.
"I wear contacts and have trouble seeing anyway," VanDerveer said. "The first half's bad. Our offense in front of us and I can't even see what we're doing defensively. I ask (assistant coach) Renee (Brown) what they're doing down there? The smoke made it really bad ... it was just so foggy in there."
VanDerveer relies on assistants Brown and Nell Fortner, both of whom have learned to trust their own eyesight rather than rely on the boss. The trio spent one afternoon going over game tapes in the hotel room prior to bus departure in the early evening. VanDerveer squinted at the intinerary and read the departure time to them, but the rest of the team had been sitting in the bus for 30 minutes when the trio arrived.
"Forty bucks, that's what that cost me," said Brown of the penalty assessed under the team's fine system. While Brown wasn't exempt from the fine, at least she's exempt from VanDerveer's driving desire to work out. As VanDerveer's jogging partner, Fortner is not so fortunate.
"We're in Siberia. It's 40 below, the snow's chest high. People were bundled up so big you couldn't even see their faces. We check into the hotel, get back from our team workout and I'm walkin' to my room. Tara says, 'Nell, we're gonna go run, right?'"
"Uh ... uh... uh ..."
"Yeah, yeah. You've got plenty of clothes, put 'em on, put 'em on," encouraged VanDerveer.
"I'm going 'Oh my God,'" Fortner recalled. "I put on everything I had, everything. We go down the stairs and she's got on hardly nothing and I can hardly walk. This guy, our interpreter, looks at us like what are you all doing?"
"We're going to go run."
"Oh no, no. Too cold, Too cold," he says. Tara's saying no it's not and I'm like, yeah it is. He can't hardly believe it and he says run in a circle right here, don't go far. Tara says we're not running in any circle. We take off, turn the corner and we're gone. I'm thinking we're in Siberia, we're gonna get lost, we're gonna freeze to death. People are looking at us like we're nuts."
The pair ran for 40 minutes -- a normal workout day for VanDerveer, who sets her own course and takes all obstacles in stride.
Volunteers win again: With wins over 17 of the teams that made up the 64-team field for the 1996 the NCAA Tournament, the USA Basketball National Team members had an insider's advantage on picking the Final Four. Jennifer Azzi, Katy Steding, Katrina McClain and Nikki McCray correctly picked three of the four (Azzi, Steding and McCray missed with Louisiana Tech instead of Georgia and McClain missed with Iowa instead of UConn). Each picked her alma mater for the title, so that means overall honors go to Tennessee grad McCray.
Lobo and Cruise: No, it's not a new TV series -- but it's close.
Rebecca Lobo had a blast filming a cameo appearance in the new Tom Cruise movie, "Jerry MacGuire." According to Lobo, "In my little bit part, which is about three seconds of this movie, I'm in my warmup suit and my hair's up in a braid so I play the role of an athlete. But I don't want to build it up because I had to fly out in the afternoon, and after I flew out they filmed some more scenes so I don't want to talk about it and have them use the ones where I'm not even in it.
"He plays a sports agent, and he walks through the agency and I'm one of their clients. He walks by and says 'Hi, Rebecca' and I say 'Hi Jerry' and that's my part. But it's kind of cool because it was 20 seconds of the movie and it took them probably the whole day to film. It's amazing to see what they go thorugh out there."
More screen gems: National Team member Katrina McClain, along with Reggie Theus and James Worthy, makes a cameo appearance on an episode of NBC television's "in The House."
Pencil in May 19 as the television debut of an ABC special on women in sports title "A Passion to Play." The network is taping the National Team and their time together on and off the court. The special is dedicated to the evolution of women's basketball.
The formal debut: Following the formal selection and announcement of the 1996 USA Olympic Women's Basketball Team in June, the USA Olympians take on the 1995 European championship runner-up Italian Olympic Team in the first half of a two-day, pre-Olympic doubleheader in Indianapolis, Indiana. The USA-Italy women's game will be held on July 13 at Market Square Arena at 8 p.m Eastern time while the USA Men's Olympic Team will face the Greek Olympic Team on July 14 at the RCA Dome.
Net music: If the faces seemed familiar but you missed the introduction, the duet that performed the national anthem prior to the NCAA Tournament Championship game between Tennessee and Georgia was Ruthie Bolton and Nikki McCray. Bolton was the lead singer in a band that played in Italy and McCray has performed the national anthem prior to Tennessee games. The National Team pair has performed the Star Spangled Banner at a trio of NBA games this season.
