By Carol Harrison
Associate Editor
"You are what your deep driving desire is.
As your desire is, so is your will.
As your will is, so is your deed.
As your deed is, so is your destiny."
-- Unknown
U.S. Olympic coach Tara VanDerveer took those words from one of the 50 books she's read during her travels this past year and penned them on the back of a picture of an Olympic gold medal.
"Every player has a notebook and they have a picture of this gold medal," VanDerveer said. "I'm a little fanatical. I take it and tape it up on my mirror."
The medal, photgraphed from the collection of three-time Olympian Teresa Edwards, serves as a daily reminder of what VanDerveer believes the past year has been about: Preparing to take the court in the Georgia Dome at 11 in the morning on Aug. 4.
"Unless TV changes the schedule, that's when the gold medal game is going to be played," said the coach who left her job at Stanford to pursue Olympic gold. She can recite the date and time of the championship by heart, as she can the Olympic schedule leading up to it. "We want to be in that game and we want to win that game."
VanDerveer is as driven and focused as they come, and she's spent much of the past 10 years learning about the international game and what it will take to make that gold medal a reality.
"We invented basketball, but we don't own it," she cautioned. "We play the game very well, but the rest of the world plays it very well also, and they play it differently. They play a very up-tempo style, a very open style. A style that emphasizes fundamentals and a style that emphasizes a lot off offensive skills. It's not to say they're not good defensive players, too, but they're very big and very physical."
The biggest of whom is China's 6-9 Haixia Zheng, the Most Outstanding Player of the 1994 World Championships after averaging 26.4 ppg and 13.1 rpg.
"Her calves were bigger than my thighs, and I thought, 'Oh my god, we're in trouble,'" USA Basketball National Team assistant coach Renee Brown said after seeing the Chinese center for the first time. At the time, Brown was no different than the vast majority of women's basketball coaches in the United States -- who have little experience with the international game and even less exposure to it. That goes doubly so for fans -- but that doesn' seem to stop everyone from putting the US Olympic team in the role of favorite -- conveniently forgetting that Brazil is the defending world champion.
VanDerveer has known from the beginning that expectations were high and the task before her was daunting. "When we put a team like this together, where do you start?" asked VanDerveer. "We put a plan together to train this team and give ourselves the best chance of being successful in the Olympics."
She started by talking with the volleyball coaches who have been training a national team for a year, and she continued by talking with professional sport franchises, since the bulk of the 11-woman National Team that likely will form the Olympic Team would be coming from professional teams in Europe or Asia.
VanDerveer made a tremendous commitment to fitness, and the strength and running programs challenged the discipline of those who preferred their workouts to include the court and a ball.
Those who slighted last summer's conditioning program became members of the Breakfast Club workout group headed by Brown -- and the results speak for themselves. The recently released Sears television ad about the USA Basketball team plays up the fit and feminine angle, and coaches who saw the ad at a screening in the national convention believe it will redefine the concept of a woman's body.
"The conditioning and fitness level takes your breath away," said one coach while watching the USA squad dismantle the Ukrainians last month. "It's a striking group of women, a group that's both athletic and attractive."
And also capable of playing the relentless kind of defense and up-tempo running game that VanDerveer believes can bring home the gold. She spoke to the Women's Basketball Coaches Association last month about the national team, sharing her philosophy on the international level and her teaching points for the USA Basketball National Team.
Rule 1: Keep it simple
Rule 2: Teach basketball, not patterns
"If you switch, they make you pay for it. If you don't come off or defend correctly, if you cheat over the top, they flare and hit the shot. If you curl or chase behind, they curl and beat you that way. It's incredible how well they read defense.
"I don't know what's happened in our American game. Maybe people play in structured situations rather than just play and be intuitive. Players want me to program them, and I fight with our team about that. I don't want to tell them to run set plays; I want them to play basketball, and I'm able to have the time to do that with this team."
Rule 3: Teach the concepts of spacing and screening
"We want to get more shots and better shots than our opponent. This is critical when playing against teams that are so skilled offensively. It comes back to basic things. The more I see, the more basics I learned from Fred Taylor, Bobby Knight's coach at Ohio State.
Our 3-point line is farther back and our lane is wider, so spacing is cirtical. If we're too tight, it doesn't give our post players room to work, so spacing is really critical. We run a 4-out offense and we emphasize screening, trying to get a lot of big-little, little-big screens.
Rule 4: Teach ball movement and player movement
"International ball is like old-time basketball. It's passing quickly, moving, screening and cutting. If you get a chance to watch international play, you'll see how quickly and how hard they cut.
"Against South Korea, they had people moving so quickly that we had people looking around who couldn't find their players. They move so well without the ball. One-thousand-one, one-thousand-two and that ball is moving. I'll count in practice. It's not usually the fault of the person with the ball, it's the other people who aren't moving and getting open.
"We really work on spacing, screening, player movement and ball movement.That's something we're trying to work on in our drills -- picking up the pace, doing it quickly and trying to execute correctly." Among the movements VanDerveer works on: vacating the post position, back picks from the post, guard up-screens for posts, give-n-goes, pick 'n rolls and splits off the post.
Rule 5: Emphasize individual skill development
"We want our post players, like Katrina McCalin and Lisa Leslie, to be able to handle the ball, to face up, make good passes and be able to put the ball on the floor," says VanDerveer.
Rule 6: Steal ideas from others
Rule 7: Take away easy baskets
On the glass: "No second shots. We emphasize putting a body on people, boxing out, Anybody can box out. I can't do a lot of things, but I can box out, and if I can box out, so can you."
From the foul line: "Our kids just go out and hack and whack. We've got to really use our fouls. Internationally, it's very critical because at eight fouls, they're shooting two shots. And these people shoot 90 percent. Fouls are like gold. You don't go out there and waste those things."
In set-up defense: VanDerveer maintains that closing on the ball to pressure the shooter and containing the ball to stop penetration are the fundamental keys to not giving up easy baskets in the half-court setting. "Internationally, they shoot so well that as soon as someone gets the ball, you have to get your hand up. And they're really talented with handling the ball, so keep the ball in front of you.They drive very well and pass off the dribble. They drive baseline and they always have someone cutting at the same time in this area (in front of basket). Keep the ball in front. The biggest thing we work on is our help defense."
Rule 8: Stay positive about defense
"A lot if its is effort and energy, and it comes down to teaching and communicating. That's one of the things Renee and Nell are good at. One of our players will get beat really bad and I'm going, 'Damn, what the hell are they doing out there.' I'll be saying it under my breath. Then Renee or Nell will be saying 'C'mon baby, you can do it.' That gets a lot better results than my saying damn."
On another front, VanDerveer emphasize the need to "tell them why they are doing something a certain way. Then they'll understand why and what they're doing," and the chances of them doing it more often and willingly increase.
"Design your own X's and O's," VanDerveer recommends. "I look at who we have every year and every team, I do something different because we have different players. Design offense for your personnnel. Try to keep it simple and emphasize reading the defense."
On the National Team, Vanderveer has the mobile Lisa Leslie and Katrina McClain in the 4 and 5 spots. By working on their ballhandling skills, she can use their mobility to pull their taller, slower defenders out, then let them go by from the top of the key or the baseline short corner. Also, by running a 4-out game, she opens up the middle for Leslie and McClain, who have less defensive help to worry about when utilizing their quickness in the pivot.
Rule 10: Use your hands
Active hands harass passers and dribblers, obscure vision and create the deflections that disrupt offensive timing and lead to steals and easy scores. In order to make deflections, players have to be in the passing lanes and aware of the ball, both of which are the cornerstones of effective pressure defense.
Within her philosophy, VanDerveer underscores the need to develop a team concept, an understanding of who does what and an acceptance of those roles. She has thoroughly enjoyed the experience of molding this collection of talent into the best American basketball team ever put together..
"Everywhere I go, people ask me what it's like working with these players," she said. "It's great . I love it. It's really, really exciting. It's been a fabulous experience working with them, training with them, and travelling with them. There's not an undercurrent, a hidden agenda. They're some of the best people in basketball and I'm going to really miss it when it's all over."
She'll also be missing Fortner and Brown in the near future as their duty as assistant coaches well before the Olympics. Colorado's Ceal Barry, Ohio State's Nancy Darsch and Kansas' Marian Washington will join the National Team on April 30 prior to the team's competition in Australia. The trio were selected by the USA Basketball Women's Staff Selection Committee last November as the assistant coaches for the 1996 Olympic Team, which will be formally announced prior to the June 19 deadline to submit Olympic rosters.
