Shooting from Outside H

Olympic officials declared 1996 the Year of the Woman, and no group realized that ideal better than the gold medal-winning U.S.A. women's basketball team, which, starting in 1995, won 60 straight games. No small contributor to that triumph was VanDerveer, who had been a head coach at Idaho State, Ohio State and Stanford when she was named coach of the American squad. Her techniques have already been analyzed by Sara Corbett in Venus to the Hoop (Forecasts, May 19), but she holds nothing back in this account of the way she molded 12 players into a team whose members came to view themselves not as disparate stars but as parts of a whole. Aided by Ryan (Little Girls in Pretty Boxes), VanDerveer single-mindedly keeps notes on every player in every game, studying videos of her team and their opponents, gathering tips from other coaches across the country and spending endless hours analyzing then formulating strategies for each contest until even her dreams--and nightmares--are about basketball. This resulting book is both exciting and inspiring. Author tour. (Sept.)