Amy Tucker/Photo by Kyle Terada
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Guess who has the nation’s best career winning percentage as a Division I women’s basketball head coach. It’s Amy Tucker, who was 29-3 in her only season as a head coach, back in 1995-96 at Stanford. She is better known for being a Stanford assistant ever since Tara VanDerveer became head coach back in 1985. Tucker has always been VanDerveer’s recruiting coordinator at Stanford and was an assistant at Ohio State for two years under VanDerveer as well. She also played for VanDerveer for two years at Ohio State. Tucker deserves considerable credit for her contributions to the program’s success, and she may be the only assistant coach with a fan club, which will be discuss in a future segment.
We thought it would be worthwhile to interview Tucker at this point, and this is Part 1 of a multi-part interview with Tucker conducted on June 9. Segments of the interview will be posted over the next several days.
Examiner.com.: What are you doing now, this time of year? You’re done with individual workouts, right?
Amy Tucker: Right. We’re done with our season. We’re done with our skill work, our offseason workout, so to speak. We get eight hours in the offseason, only two of those eight hours can be on the court. But that’s per player, so we would do them in their position groups: perimeter work and post work. So we only had a five-week program. After the Final Four ended, we gave the kids two weeks off, so it was a quick program.
Ex.: Anybody make tremendous progress in that period, or can you tell?
AT: Oh, you can tell, yeah. Especially the young players, the freshmen, you can see their bodies changing. More of an emphasis on our weight training, strength and conditioning in the spring, so you’re seeing some real changes in terms of their strength and fitness levels. And then, for us as coaches, we kind of use those two hours to work individually with kids on their weaknesses, which is really hard to do in the season. Then (during the season), you’re doing team stuff. So it’s really fun to see kids really improve.
Ex.: Anybody in particular?
AT: Nneka (Ogwumike), Sarah Boothe, Lindy (LaRocque).
Ex.: Any particular way?
AT: I think all three of them, fitness and conditioning. For Nneka, working on her high-post game. Her perimeter shot is really coming along, so she’ll be able to pull away from the basket a little bit and feel comfortable. Sarah, everything we heard about Sarah in the spring from the other kids playing pickup – we can’t watch pickup either – is that she was just a beast, just dominating games. So for her, it’s a lot of confidence. Unfortunately, she’s hurt now. She just had surgery on her foot for a navicular stress fracture. The navicular bone on top of your foot doesn’t receive any blood supply, so the best way for them to heal it is to insert a pin in there to get the blood flowing, so it shortens the rehab time considerably. You could not do surgery, but then it would be a long . . . .
Ex.: So what’s her prognosis?
AT: She’ll probably be non-weight-bearing for about three months. But she had a great spring, so unfortunately she can’t really build on that. She was on the Under-19 team (USA Basketball Under-19 team) , so she had to pull out of that..
Ex.: So by the season, she should be OK?
AT: Yeah, she should be able to start, you know, we’ll be conservative with her in terms of bringing her back. She won’t be doing any extra running or pounding on her foot. But she would be ready by next season.
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Just for the record -
Amy is the Associate Head coach not assistant
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