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What: “Shooting from the Outside.”

Author: Tara VanDerveer, with Joan Ryan.

Publisher: Avon.

Two American Basketball League (ABL) seasons and one Women’s National Basketball Assn. (WNBA) season later, Stanford and 1996 women’s Olympic team Coach Tara VanDerveer’s week-by-week account of the 60-0 drive to the gold medal offers a unique look at how far the women’s game has traveled in less than two years since the Atlanta Olympics.

With a team brought together when there were no U.S. professional leagues to wearing gold medals when there were two, VanDerveer offers many poignant moments she experienced on the road to Atlanta, and here is the best one:

After the NBA signed on as a major sponsor of USA basketball, and after VanDerveer signed on as the head coach, Commissioner David Stern asked to have lunch with her. According to VanDerveer, he looked her in the eye and said: “The only person who can mess this up is you.”

“Those words,” she said, “would wake me up at night.”

Nearly two years later, five of her Olympians are in the WNBA, seven in the ABL.

Lisa Leslie, Teresa Edwards and Nikki McCray have become pro stars; Jennifer Azzi, Venus Lacy, Rebecca Lobo and Dawn Staley have become first-class pros.

VanDerveer must be surprised by the slow start to Katrina McClain’s U.S. pro career. In the book, she says of her: “[She] might be the best female basketball player in the world.” Today, she isn’t even the best player in Atlanta. She’s been overshadowed there by her Atlanta Glory (ABL) coach and teammate, point guard Teresa Edwards.

But to VanDerveer, her ’96 team will always be America’s team. She offered this thought, from one of her first meetings with her dream team:

“I looked around the room at the women. . . . I saw eight African Americans and three Caucasians. I saw women of ages ranging from 22 to 31. Some had grown up on cracked blacktop courts, surrounded by tenements, others in cheery YMCAs and on driveways with hoops bolted to garages. They were America.”