Editor’s Note: This story is included in The Athletic’s Best of 2022. View the full list.

NORTHERN MINNESOTA — Tara VanDerveer leans back in her Adirondack chair, dogs Enzo and Piper asleep at her feet. She gets quiet, folds her arms and squints past the birch and pine trees as the sun drops toward the tree line across the lake. Pulling out her phone, she confirms what she already knew — the wind, currently breezing at around 4 mph, should fall to 1 to 2 mph in the next hour.

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“Perfect,” she says.

She puts the dogs inside the cabin; they press their noses against the picture windows facing the lake. They’re her only real audience here, and she likes it that way.

VanDerveer, 69, retrieves a wetsuit and pink life jacket from the clothesline and heads into the sauna to change. When she emerges, she still looks like the country’s winningest women’s basketball coach but also, nothing at all like her. There is, of course, the iconic bob haircut, and perhaps it should come as no surprise that anything she does, she commits to thoroughly (hence, the wetsuit). But her energy radiates like everyone else on the water, the lake junkies who live for these nights with perfect ski conditions, the people who love (truly love) their boats.

She bought this cabin shortly after leading Team USA to gold at the 1996 Olympics. In the previous decade, she had never taken more than two weeks away from the game — the academic calendar was committed to Stanford and her summers devoted to Team USA and recruiting. A worldwide, 52-city tour to grow the popularity of the women’s game before the Olympics had taken its toll. But during the team’s stop at Old Dominion, on an early morning run along the Elizabeth River, she decided she would buy a house on the water when the Olympics concluded.

Thus began her cross-country search — from Virginia to Idaho to California — to find a refuge. She just wanted a quiet place with a quiet lake. And that’s what she found in rustic northern Minnesota.

It was less the summer home of a millionaire coach and closer to a caricature of The Land of 10,000 Lakes, where house numbers are replaced by signs featuring that family’s name, where grills are fired up nightly because there are no restaurants within 20 miles and where cabin walls are adorned with lake art with quaint phrases like “A day at the lake is worth a month in the town” ― a sign that hangs in VanDerveer’s stairwell.

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When she got the keys to the cabin, there was no bedroom, no shower and it looked as if it hadn’t been updated much since it was built in 1938. But the lot had room for a boat slip on the shore, space to build a garage to store her sailboat and lake views from almost every angle in the cabin.

It was perfect.

For several years, no one seemed to notice the national championship coach and Olympic gold medalist who was spending part of her summers next door. “It’s more of a hockey state anyways,” her lake friends admit.

For VanDerveer, that was also perfect.

She walks down to the dock, inspects her boat and checks the water temperature — a comfortable 72 degrees. Seven years ago, she bought the used speedboat from a guy in Connecticut who responded to her inquiry email by saying yes, he would sell her the boat, but also, “Do you happen to coach basketball?” Because, of course, her path to the perfect boat would lead her through Connecticut.

When the wind has died down and the sun has nearly set on this warm August evening, VanDerveer finally steps onto the boat. It’s 7:50 p.m. A month from now, she’ll be back in Palo Alto, Calif., preparing for another run at a national title with Stanford. But tonight, she has a much different kind of run ahead of her, and, save a pontoon idling on the south end of the lake, the water is entirely hers.

She zips up her life jacket and smiles.

“Here,” she says, “I am totally at peace.”

Six years before VanDerveer won her third national title and seven before she passed Pat Summitt as the winningest women’s basketball coach in history, VanDerveer thought she was close to retirement.

In so many ways, that 2014-15 season was like many of the others she had coached at Stanford: The Cardinal upset and lost to top-10 teams on the road and at home, they won the Pac-12 Tournament and ended the season ranked in the Top 25.

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But she was different.

“I was just exhausted and I wasn’t enthusiastic,” VanDerveer says. “When you’re not feeling fresh or you’re not feeling refreshed, you’re not as good as you can be.”

And VanDerveer had become as good as she could be by grinding and giving all of her time to the sport. She once consulted a friend (who also happened to be a psychologist) and asked him, “Do you think I should be worried about myself because all I do is work?” He said no, there were seasons to life, and it wouldn’t always be that way. But the truth was, it always had.

Now, she was in her early 60s, and she had seemingly accomplished it all: conference championships, national championships, Olympic championships, a Hall of Fame induction. She had molded All-Americans and No. 1 draft picks. She was among the top-10 winningest coaches in basketball history. No one would’ve faulted her for walking away.

At a dinner after the season, John Arrillaga — a longtime Stanford donor and a person generally in the Stanford-know — approached the coach and told her that he had heard she was considering retirement.

“Don’t do it,” he said. “Just take the summer off. Get away.”

VanDerveer laughed. Coaches didn’t just take the summers off. Maybe some did, but she didn’t. In her three-decade coaching career, VanDerveer had never missed a practice or a game. And even if she wanted to, there was no way Stanford athletic director Bernard Muir would go for that.

She thanked Arrillaga for the conversation, excused herself and drove home.

Fifteen minutes later, her phone rang. It was Arrillaga. He had just spoken with Muir.

“Bernard is fine with it,” he told her. “Take the summer off. Go.”

So VanDerveer did the unthinkable — for the first time in her career, she would take some time away from the game.

And with a whole summer off in 2015, the first place she went was to her small log cabin in Northern Minnesota, a two-bedroom dream facing westward on a lake with no public access. She had visited for a couple weeks in August every summer since 1998 (after renovations were complete following the purchase in 1996), but she had never really settled in.

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She kayaked in the mornings, sat on the back porch for meals, played online bridge with her mom in the evenings and frequently ended her days in the sauna. She water-skied daily behind her jet ski, recruiting friends and visitors to drive her. And in July she left that cabin for another in Chautauqua, N.Y., where she had spent parts of her childhood summers, before returning to Northern Minnesota for the entire month of August.

She didn’t recruit. Didn’t coach. Didn’t think about basketball. For a summer, she hit pause and realized that she didn’t need retirement, she just needed something. Something different than what she had always done, something different than what had brought about all the success.

Shortly after VanDerveer arrived at Stanford in 1985, longtime Cardinal track coach Brooks Johnson had pulled her aside and told her, “You can do your clinics and tell people how you work, but never tell them how much you rest.” And, whenever he’d see her on campus he’d remind her: “Tara, rest is not just a four-letter word.”

And VanDerveer had taken it to heart … for her team.

She had structured her season to have a slow ramp up and a long tapering off period, moving the most intense practices into the fourth, fifth and sixth weeks of the season and starting to pull back on everything else — length, intensity, contact — midway through February. It made so much sense to her that her team needed to make sure their legs were freshest in March, and in order to do that they needed to rest.

But she had never considered that kind of rest for herself. Not until she took that summer off.

Now, she thinks back to 2015, how close she thought she was to walking away, how exhausted she was when she arrived in the summer and how different she felt when she returned to Palo Alto in the fall. That summer changed her and sustained her. That summer, in many ways, is why she still does what she does. Or, why she can, at least.

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“You only have so much tread on your tires,” she says.

VanDerveer is a lake person because her parents were lake people. And while it’s not scientifically a genetic marker, most lake people would beg to differ — if you grew up on the water, there’s something about a lake’s stillness that just hits differently.

Even VanDerveer’s sister Heidi, who coaches at UC San Diego and can see the Pacific Ocean from her home, acknowledges the difference.

“The ocean is beautiful, but there’s something about a lake that has your soul,” she says. “You can take a different kind of breath.”

In 1950, VanDerveer’s dad, Dunbar, bought a modest one-bedroom cabin on Schroon Lake in Upstate New York. He introduced wife Rita to the cabin shortly after and three years later when Tara was born, she became the first VanDerveer child to spend her summers at the lake. A decade and four more children later, Dunbar and Rita purchased a cabin on Saranac Lake, somehow finding one even more remote than the first.

Because both parents were educators, the entire family had the summers off together. And every year on the last day of school, the family station wagon would be parked facing the street, the family boat hitched on the back. Sandwiches were prepped and bags were precariously stacked and strapped on top of the car. Tara, Beth and Marie would climb into the middle seats; Heidi and Nick would take the back seats, facing the rear toward the boat. Dunbar would make a final call for the bathroom – he’d only stop if they found a gas station on their side of the road (no way were they wasting time crossing over the median).

The cabin had no electricity or running water, which meant the family had to take its small boat across the lake to a natural spring to collect fresh water for the cabin every few days. The place was so quiet and remote that any time another boat came into their area of the bay, it became the highlight of the week. It was here that VanDerveer learned how to swim, fish, and later, how to water ski.

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The VanDerveers befriended another family on the lake that owned a speed boat and VanDerveer watched as their kids — avid water-skiers — cut across the water on a single slalom ski. She had snow-skied before, so she felt as though this wouldn’t be that different. On her first attempt behind the boat at age 8, she decided to drop one of her two skis, so she, too, could slalom. On her second attempt, she tried to just get up on one ski (something that takes most recreational skiers years to accomplish, if they ever do). She did that, too.

“That, honestly, started the whole visualization process that I use today in coaching,” she says.

After a month at the family cabin, they would then head to the Chautauqua Institution on Lake Chautauqua, a 2,000-acre resort in western New York, where VanDerveer’s dad ran summer programs for Syracuse and, later, a bed-and-breakfast.

“The Institute,” as the family called it, was an entirely different experience. It was busy and loud with hordes of children running around. The VanDerveer kids would spend their days at the Boys and Girls Club, the local sailing club or other educational endeavors. VanDerveer taught swim lessons and competed in sailing competitions, participated in three operas and took flute lessons from a nationally renowned flutist.

After seven weeks, they’d head back to the family cabin to close out the summer, ending their August on a quiet note. They’d close up the cabin the day before school began, pulling into the driveway sometime around midnight. Rita would argue they were getting back too late; Dunbar would say they needed to soak up all the lake time.

“We better still fit into our shoes,” VanDerveer says, “because that’s what we were wearing the next day.”

Six decades later, that was how she decided she would spend her years, again.

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In Northern Minnesota, she chooses her ski time based on the weather conditions, but at Chautauqua, it’s all about hitting the water before the lake gets too crowded. Her record in a summer is 90 days of skiing, and she thinks — if the weather holds out a bit — she’ll hit 75 this year.

“I think I’m just trying to recreate my childhood life,” VanDerveer says, shortly after sharing a new and more efficient s’mores technique she learned this summer.

There’s a natural perspective that comes with time, but for VanDerveer, that new balance was brought about by her summers at the lake, how it forced her to give up some control and instead, slow down for herself.

“I’ve known Tara for a long time and she still is obsessed with basketball, but at one point, that was maybe all she did in her career — 365 days a year, non-stop,” longtime associate head coach Kate Paye said. “This offers a sense of balance, maybe it’s healthier, maybe it has allowed her to grow, evolve and learn.”

In recent years, those around her have seen her lighter side coming to the forefront. She gladly embraced the nickname “T-Dawg” from her players (and a large fleece jacket embroidered with the name); she danced the electric slide with her team after winning a regional title. After winning the national championship in 2021, she arrived at the press conference rocking a backwards hat, and shortly after, she received a quick phone call from Arrillaga.

“Aren’t you glad you didn’t retire?” he asked.

She agreed and thanked him. She knows how those moments were rooted in that conversation and her decision to step away for a bit. Because she’s not sure if she would still be coaching if it weren’t for that conversation.

“Maybe?” she says, “Probably.

“But I don’t know if I’d be as happy. I don’t know if I’d enjoy it all as much.”

Just before 8, VanDerveer drops her ski in the water and jumps in.

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She grabs the rope and moves it back and forth against the water, getting into her rhythm and shaking out potential knots. The typical ski rope length is 75 feet, but hers — like competitive slalom skiers — is knotted to a shorter length (53 feet, to be exact) so she has greater control in the water.

For a while, it’s just her bobbed haircut and pink life jacket visible from the boat, but she quickly pops up from the water and begins her daily therapy.

She starts on her first lap around the lake, the boat drifting right before cutting a sharp left turn at the west end of the lake as VanDerveer flies out onto the glassiest part of the water. The rope slacks and tightens as the 69-year-old careens from left to right, left to right like a metronome on the water.

Her mom used to say that the lake sustained her through the school year when she was a teacher. VanDerveer didn’t completely understand it then. She does now.

She no longer takes the full summer off as she did in 2015, but she does make the lakes — in Northern Minnesota or Western New York — her home bases for the summer months. VanDerveer returns to Stanford for minicamps in June and July, goes on recruiting trips to tournaments occasionally throughout the summer and takes calls with her current staff, players and recruits.

But when she returns “home” from those trips in the summer, she returns to the lake. And when she picks up her phone, she’s on her back porch looking at the water.

“Could anything be more perfect?” VanDerveer asks.

When she does retire, she doesn’t think her summers will look all that different than they do now. But she doesn’t know when that will be. She’s not ready. Not yet.

The lake is a world away from the basketball courts she’ll inhabit in a few weeks and she’ll cry when she puts the boat into storage (but, she’ll also remind the dogs and herself “it’ll be minus 40 degrees here before too long.”) But for now the winningest coach of all time is right at home, flying on a 6-inch-wide piece of wood at 30 mph behind a boat, her ski sending spray 15 feet in the air behind her as the sun falls behind the trees.

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When the boat finishes its first full lap, she drops down, slowly and controlled, into the water, disappearing under it for a second.

When she emerges, she yells toward the boat, “Let’s run it back one more time.”

(Top photo: Chantel Jennings / The Athletic)