Stanford Women’s Team on Decline

As a high school basketball star in New Jersey, point guard Erica Gomez used to marvel at Stanford reaching the Final Four year after year. She visited the campus, and dreamed about playing hoops in California.

Then she enrolled at UCLA, which she has helped become a national power and a team expected to finish higher than Stanford in the Pac-10 conference for the second straight season.

“I think Stanford contributed a lot to people wanting to come to the west coast and play in the Pac-10,” Gomez said. “For me, it came down to UCLA and Stanford. I felt like I wanted to build something, like it was not going to be expected to win all the time.”

Stanford, the team that made six Final Four apprearances in an eight-year span from 1990-97 and won two national championships, dominated women’s basketball on the west coast for years. In the decade beginning in 1988-89, Stanford won the Pac-10 title nine times.

But the Cardinal have lost in the first round of the NCAA tournament the past two seasons, to such unlikely conquerors as Harvard and Maine, and finished third in the Pac-10 last season -- behind co-champions UCLA and Oregon, who are expected to vie for the conference title again this season.

“The adage that it’s harder to stay on top than to get on top is true,” said Stanford coach Tara VanDerveer, whose school has sent eight players to the pros in the past two years. “When you have an exodus of that much talent, it’s tough to fill the void. That’s what happened last year.”

Stanford began last season with three straight losses and fell out of the Top 25 for the first time since the start of the 1987-88 season. A home winning streak that had reached 59 games by the end of the 1997-98 regular season was snapped.

The Cardinal defeated Purdue in the following game, the only loss for the national champion Boilermakers last season, and Stanford went on a seven-game winning streak in the middle of the year. But it was not the usual dominant Cardinal team.

“Teams, when they get on a run, can build a mystique,” said California coach Marianne Stanley, who co-coached the Cardinal to the Final Four in 1995-96 when VanDerveer took a year off to coach the U.S. Olympic team to a gold medal at the Atlanta Games. “But the rest of the league did what it had to do, step our game up to reach that level.”

VanDerveer returned from coaching the Olympic team to lead Stanford to a 34-2 record in 1996-97, including an 18-0 conference record and a one-point loss to Old Dominion in the Final Four semifinals.

But that previous season away from her team may have hurt recruiting, and may have led in part to the disappointing last two years for Stanford.

“The players that are out there, they don’t really care what you’ve done, they want to know what you can do for them,” VanDerveer said. “It was disruptive to leave for a year.”

Opposing coaches, such as Oregon’s Jody Runge, resent the implication that the Pac-10 is so much more competitive now because Stanford is in decline. Instead, she said, the rest of the league has gotten much better.

“The rest of the country would like to say Stanford has come down a notch, but that’s very insulting to the rest of our conference,” Runge said. “As coaches, we take great offense to when we and UCLA win the conference title and people think it’s because Stanford is down.”

The Cardinal are more experienced this year, and they add talented freshman point guard Jamie Carey to a squad that includes sophomore shooting guard Lindsey Yamasaki -- the team’s leading scorer at 14 points a game last season.

With UCLA battling injuries, Stanford could end up in the mix for the conference title once again. But don’t expect Stanford to automatically win the Pac-10, as it did throughout most of the past decade.

“When you have someone who’s been up there so long, you want to catch up in a hurry,” Arizona coach Joan Bonvicini said. “We’ve used them as a measuring stick. Other teams have caught up.”