STANFORD, California—At home over breakfast Thursday morning with sister Heidi, Tara VanDerveer formulated a plan to somehow help the suffering Ukrainian people who still mean so much to her years after she took the US national team to play there.
The Hall of Fame Stanford coach pledged $10 for every three-pointer made in the women’s NCAA Tournament toward humanitarian efforts in Ukraine, and she challenged anyone else who could give to do so—even just a dime per 3 if possible.
Georgia Tech coach Nell Fortner, whose team played its first-round NCAA game against Kansas at Stanford last Friday, immediately joined VanDerveer’s fundraising efforts. She was an assistant coach on that US team.
“I want to put a challenge out to other coaches, to our fans, to everyone in here, my sister’s already accepted the challenge, I’d like to donate to the Ukraine humanitarian fund—and I’m not sure which fund it will be yet—$10 for every three-point made in the NCAA women’s tournament,” VanDerveer said as defending champion and top-seeded Stanford prepared to take on Montana State in the first round.
Heidi VanDerveer, the coach at UC San Diego, wasn’t sure she could commit $10 for every three-pointer but said, “I’m going to do whatever I can.” She and her sister were still discussing which organizations to support, perhaps choosing several.
“The fun thing about Tara, everyone talks about basketball and everything else, but she referred to her bubble. We’re all in a basketball bubble but the rest of the world keeps going,” Heidi said. “The great thing about her is that she definitely has the bigger picture in mind and understands that from traveling the world just how fortunate we are. And when you can help somebody, you do. It’s great. It’s awesome.”
Tara VanDerveer’s 1996 Olympic champion US national team played in the Ukrainian capital of Kyiv leading up to the Atlanta Games, and faced the Ukrainian national team about 10 times.
“I would call them our cousins because we saw them in so many tournaments and played against them,” VanDerveer recalled. “So maybe I have an affinity for the country, and watching what’s happening has been really, really very hard. When our team was leaving Ukraine, women at 3:30 in the morning were begging outside of our bus. And our team emptied their suitcases, emptied their wallets, just were very generous.”
Said Fortner: “That was a phenomenal trip over there, and it was an eye-opening trip in a lot of ways.”
VanDerveer has asked associate director of communications Wilder Treadway to track her total each day.
“I hope people can make a lot of 3s and that I can be very generous,” VanDerveer said, “and I hope other people will get on board with this challenge and I’d like people to match the challenge.”
Georgia Tech guard Sarah Bates plans to contribute to the effort with her play.
“My job is to be a shooter and to make as many 3s as possible, so I’m planning on doing that anyway,” she said. “But if it’s to help the efforts in Ukraine as well, that’s just another motivation to make more 3s. I think that’s awesome what she’s doing and I hope other people are on board and willing to shoot more 3s so we can get more money out there.”
A diversity report for graduation rates among this year’s NCAA Tournament teams, meanwhile, found the gap between white and Black men’s players has shrunk compared to last season.
The study released recently from The Institute for Diversity and Ethics in Sport (TIDES) at Central Florida found that racial gap in average Graduation Success Rate (GSR) scores had declined from about 13.4 percentage points last year to 11.4 this season. That was due to gains by Black players (up 3.4 percentage points to 83.7 percent) outpacing those by white players (up 1.3, to 95.1 percent),
“The gap has frequently narrowed, and especially on the men’s side, when the white graduation rate when down rather than the Black graduation rate going up,” institute director and lead report author Richard Lapchick told The Associated Press. “So the fact that this went up is really an important thing to note for the Black student-athletes.”
The racial gap also exists on the women’s side, but is smaller.
This year’s gap 6.3 percentage points and was only slightly higher than last season (6.1), with white women’s players up to 98.8 percent this year and Black women’s players up to 92.5 percent.
As an example, the study found that 10 men’s teams had white players ahead of Black players in graduation rates by a gap of at least 30 percentage points. UCLA, which reached last year’s Final Four, had the biggest at 71 percentage points, while the list included a No. 1 seed in Arizona, Saint Mary’s and Indiana all at 50.
By comparison, only four women’s teams in this year’s tournament field fit that category: Mount St. Mary’s (40), Arkansas (37), UNLV (37) and Utah (33).
Women continue to outperform men in average GSR, though the gender gap shrunk significantly from 10.7 percentage points last year to 6.7, with women at 93.9 percent and men at 87.2 percent. Lapchick noted, though that the women have less room to improve with their routinely higher scores.
“The gap has narrowed, so that’s somewhat encouraging,” Lapchick said. “But it always says to me that the emphasis has been much stronger on the women’s side. I think it’s gotten stronger on the men’s side as they’ve realized with academic reforms they could not make postseason play.”
The study looked primarily at the GSR, which was developed to allow the NCAA to track the progress of Division I student-athletes for six years following their entrance to schools. GSR doesn’t penalize schools for athletes who leave in good academic standing and counts transfers at their new schools, while a federal graduation rate would consider them non-graduates and doesn’t factor in those common roster movements. AP
Image credits: AP