Tara VanDerveer: Like one time I was working with a coach. She was really… she was fabulous. She was helping me with our offense. Like, she and her husband worked with me for days on this offense. And I was, you know, peppering her with questions and questions and questions, and, you know, taking notes and doing video and everything. I mean, we’re talking—she was… she was so awesome. And after, it was like 6:00 at night, and she goes, “Tara, can I just ask you one thing?” I’m like, “Sure, you can ask me anything.” You know, I’ve been asking her, like, for days about things. And she goes, “Why do your teams always win?” You know? And I’m just like, “I don’t know. We expect to.” You know, we… we… we just—we expect to win, and we have confidence that we will be successful because we buy into, you know, our… kind of the routines that we do, and the… the… the drills and the practice and the everything that we’re doing is about being successful. And even if you’re taking little bumps along the way, if you lose, like, a game along the way, you learn from it and you get better. So, I think there’s… I think it’s just a confidence and a, you know, just the idea that this is why we’re doing this—is to be successful.
Coach Knight—if I do remember one thing that he said—it would be, “Mental is to physical as four is to one.” The ability to concentrate, the ability to keep playing hard, the ability to get up when you get knocked down—the mental toughness that I see in someone like a Caitlin Clark is really special. Players that I’ve had—Nneka Ogwumike, Jayne Appel, Candice Wiggins—I mean, the great, great players are players that are… they’re driven, they’re competitive, they’re… they don’t get discouraged, they don’t get frustrated. They do have a… a mental drive that is different. And those players, like an Olympian, is that kind of player. An Olympian is someone that just keeps battling. It’s not necessarily, you know, someone just… in athletics, you’re not born with an athletic silver spoon in your mouth. You have to work. And they’re not afraid of hard work. They’re not afraid of, you know, failing. They’re going to get back up and keep working hard. And it is really, really fun to coach and be around incredibly tough people—like, mentally tough. They can be very kind people, but they’re mentally tough people. And that’s… that’s… that is a—that’s a fun team to have when you have mentally tough players. And I’ve had… I’ve coached a lot of them. And it’s also very obvious when someone who might be very talented is not of that caliber mentally—and that’s very… that’s very hard.