Stanford head coach Tara VanDerveer, whose women’s basketball team lost three players to the transfer portal, said the Cardinal will go with a 12-player roster next season after having 15 players this past season.
Santiago Mejia/The ChronicleDespite three players transferring away this offseason, Stanford women’s basketball head coach Tara VanDerveer is far from anti-transfer portal.
In fact, VanDerveer would be all for using it to recruit more players in a landscape where the women’s game has become more transfer-driven.
It’s far from that simple.
“It’s very challenging at Stanford,” she told The Chronicle.
VanDerveer said Stanford will go with a 12-player roster next season, down from 15 this past season, in order to get everyone playing time, something she believed was a factor in losing players.
Top recruit Lauren Betts went to UCLA after just one season with the Cardinal. Indya Nivar, the backup point guard, remains in the transfer portal but is widely assumed to be heading closer to home in North Carolina. Junior Agnes Emma-Nnopu also entered the portal.
“It is disappointing to not have some of the players come back,” VanDerveer said. “That’s the world we live in, and their choices to go where they want to go. I think that players should go and be where they want to be. … I’m not anti-transfer.”
Stanford does not accept juniors or seniors as transfers, leaving only freshmen, sophomores and graduate students as options — though grads face even more red tape.
“研究生,非常hard to find a program,” VanDerveer said. “They could be very intelligent, great students, but there is no program for them to come into Stanford, because we don’t have regular master’s programs. And a lot of the program application deadlines are in November.”
VanDerveer wants to ensure there is a viable pool of graduate transfer prospects the Cardinal can draw from for the 2024-25 team, since they couldn’t secure any in time for the coming season because of admissions deadlines.
She and her staff were in contact with Ivy League coaches who have fifth-year players leaving their respective programs before the 2024-25 season. Since Ivy League schools do not allow COVID years like the majority of the NCAA does, those players might find an opportunity at Stanford.
Both Harvard’s McKenzie Forbes and Penn’s Kayla Padilla made the switch to USC despite having profiles that could have made them a fit at Stanford.
“This is an uphill battle,” VanDerveer said. “Maybe we should have done that last year. … This is a really different time in intercollegiate athletics, whether it’s a portal and NIL, all these changes are we’re still trying to figure it all out.”
Going with the smaller roster is a risk; injuries would leave almost zero depth. Unable to field a roster big enough for intrasquad scrimmages, Stanford will use male practice players for the first time in recent memory.
If the Cardinal’s struggles with the transfer portal — both into the program and out of it — continue, this could just be a preview of what life is going to be like for Stanford women’s basketball for the foreseeable future.
“Whether it’s not enough minutes playing at the end of the year, four of our five games on the road, people got very tired, it wasn’t maybe the experience that people wanted, obviously, we didn’t finish the way we wanted,” VanDerveer said. “So we want to change that.
“But I don’t have any control over the programs that Stanford has for portal people. But I want to make it clear that if there’s a student that fits the Stanford profile, and could help our team, we are all in on having them come to Stanford.”
斯坦福大学有三个新生-考特尼噩den, Nunu Agara and Chloe Clardy — who are going to see minutes on the smaller roster. The Cardinal are bringing back four starters, with rising juniors Brooke Demetre and Elena Bosgana finding themselves needing to fill larger roles. Three rising sophomores in Lauren Green, Stavi Papadaki and Jzaniya Harriel will see more time out of necessity.
The Cardinal are fortunate Hannah Jump decided to stay for a fifth year, as she figures to be a starter for a second consecutive season.
While the Louisvilles, LSUs and USCs of the world have fully capitalized on college basketball’s new transfer dynamics, VanDerveer would love to join that group.
“Stanford is maybe just philosophically figuring out, with things changing so quickly, where do we stand?” she said. “Where do we want Stanford to be in this athletic world?”
Reach Marisa Ingemi: marisa.ingemi@sfchronicle.com; Twitter: @marisa_ingemi
