Sequoia sempervirens, better known as the California Redwood, is synonymous with our little corner of the Bay Area. Arboreally minded, I can’t help but geek out on how special these trees are.
For starters, they’re massive, towering anywhere from 200 to 330 feet into the air. Next, they have remarkable longevity, surviving up to and beyond 2000 years. But above all else, they are resilient, equipped with an impressive array of fire-resistant properties from insulated bark to reduced levels of flammable pitch and resin. In fact, when fires scorch the Bay’s ridges and inject the sky with that characteristic orange hue, the California Redwood population tends to grow back stronger than before. Seriously! There’s a study and everything!
The landscape that Stanford Women’s Basketball enters this year may seem as bleak as a California hillside, ablaze. The team graduated two spark plug players in Kiki Iriafen and Hannah Jump as well as a legendary one in Cameron Brink. The program lost Coach Tara VanDerveer to retirement, a brilliant torchbearer for the Cardinal and a visionary trailblazer for women’s sports. The conference, our beloved Pac-12, was razed by a collective of arsonists (U$C, UCLA, Fox, and ESPN), sending Stanford to find refuge in the ACC. Even the sport at large is in metamorphosis thanks to a wild conflagration of changes like NIL, transfer portal usage, and an explosive growth in popularity. Amidst change burning through every layer of the game, Stanford Women’s Basketball needs to display serious resilience. Who better to lead the rebuild from the ashes than a bonafide California Redwood?
Coach Kate Paye grew up in the shade of Stanford trees, just a few miles from campus. The magic of Jane Stanford routinely reached her doorstep. When we sat down with Coach just a few days ago on Halloween, and she painted a clear picture:
“I grew up around Stanford. My entire family went to Stanford. I was a Stanford band member for Halloween one year as a kid!”
Kate’s father and older brother, John Paye and John Paye, both played football at Stanford. She was attending Stanford athletics events her whole life, attending tailgates organized by her mom and cheering on her brother in his two-sport stardom. One of the younger John’s teammates was Eric Reveno, who enters his second stint as a Stanford men’s basketball assistant coach this year.
Kate walked on to Stanford and immediately earned playing time. She was part of the 1992 National Championship team. She ultimately earned three degrees from Stanford: a bachelor’s in Political Science and then a JD/MBA. She came to play school.
Although she ultimately chose not to directly use her degrees, Kate Paye still draws indirect value from her expansive Stanford education.
“I can still consider myself a teacher and an educator,” said Paye. “ And when you're a teacher and educator, you bring all of your life experience to your work when you're coaching, teaching, mentoring. Certainly my education at Stanford, both as an undergraduate at the law school, at the business school, it's all part of my experience and who I am and are things that I can draw on.”
In talking to Coach Paye, one thing is clear: she is coaching college basketball for the right reasons. There is a lot of pageantry around the sport, and with the rapid growth in women’s basketball and the vast sums of money being thrown around to coaches and players alike, it is easy to get caught up in the glitz. But Kate Paye has her motivations rooted in the right place.
“Our theme this year is sisterhood,” Kate said. “We call it the Stanford sisterhood when we're recruiting. That is the foundation of our culture, in that our players, our staff, we treat each other like family.”
The term sisterhood derives from literal sisters and legends of the program, Chiney and Nneka Ogwumike. Many great players have come through this program and have led to all kinds of individual and team accolades. But perhaps their biggest legacy here was in the way they carried themselves.
“It wasn't until we saw the way [Chiney and Nneka] interacted, we were like, yeah, you know, it's like the way sisters treat each other, that's how great teammates should be,” said Coach Paye.
And therein lies one advantage of transitioning to a coach that knows the program inside and out. She mentions that the staff likes to coach with stories. Kate can draw on a rich book of Stanford stories spanning three decades. She has seen just about everything, and understands what it takes to build a winning culture, and to lead an organization that molds successful young women.
Kate is forging her own path, but she is still in constant contact with the recently retired Tara VanDerveer.
“[Tara’s] an incredible mentor,” Kate said. “Most importantly, she's a great friend. You don't just stop being friends with somebody.”
Paye has plenty of other coaching influences. She always starts right up the road with Steve Kerr, someone who has come to Stanford on multiple occasions. She admires Gonzaga coach Lisa Fortier, who will be the opponent on Tara VanDerveer court dedication day. Lynne Roberts of Utah is another competitor from whom she takes ideas. Kate’s even started to pick the brain of new Stanford men’s coach Kyle Smith. She brings plenty of her own perspectives to the table, but don’t expect her to push too far away from the Stanford status quo. Tara VanDerveer will still remain a strong influence.
“It would be flat out stupid not to take her advice, her insight, any tidbits of wisdom that she sees, if she's watching our team play,” said Coach Paye.
This year’s team is the first one since the 1990s to start the season unranked. It would be easy to perceive that as a snub, but that is not at all the narrative within the program. Kate has seen many times that there are always players ready to step up, even in the wake of program legends graduating.
“I've been here long enough to see when one person graduates, it creates opportunity, and we have incredible student athletes on our team,” said Paye. “They've all been leaders in high school or their club teams or on their campuses or in their communities, before coming to Stanford, and they're ready to step up to that opportunity.”
She expects upperclassmen Brooke Demetre and Talana Lepolo to step into larger leadership roles. Fourth year players Jzaniya Harriel and Elena Bosgana are also primed to shoulder that responsibility.
This year may not have the star power of a Cameron Brink or a Kiki Iriafen, but that doesn’t mean someone wont muscle up and produce. Purdue transfer Mary Ashley Stevenson dropped 27 in a secret scrimmage last month, for example. Nunu Agara went for 25 in last week’s exhibition game.
“This could be a team where we have a different leading scorer every night,” said Paye. “And I point blank asked our team, will that be okay with you? And they all say, yes, absolutely. We just want Stanford to be successful.”
This will be a new look team, and there will be a new head coach patrolling the sidelines. But this program will remain rooted in the rich traditions that make it special. That goes from staying in chair number 4, where she’s sat for years on the bench, to the way the team acknowledges the Stanford Band.
“Our team, our program, our staff, we love the band,” Kate said. ‘I think it's a mutual kind of admiration society. One of the special things about tournament time is the band sendoffs. Our team absolutely loves that. That is a tradition I'll keep up.”
The official motto of Stanford University is Die Luft der Freiheit Weht, which is German for The Wind of Freedom Blows. Proposed by founding Stanford President David Starr Jordan (who almost certainly killed Jane Stanford), the motto was a bold choice at a time when simple Latin mottos were popular in elite universities. Stanford’s Board of Trustees, led by one George E. Crothers (of Crothers Hall fame), opposed Jordan’s motto, disliking the degree of freedom it implied for its students. The Board initially championed the resolutely boring Truth and Service before proposing a viable challenger to the motto we know and love today:
Semper Virens, which means “Ever Flourishing.”
While the Board’s homage to the California Redwood’s scientific name eventually lost out (and not without controversy), its spirit lives on in Coach Kate Paye, a Stanford Tree through and through, who just like the program she helms is Bay Area grown, Resilient, and Ever Flourishing.
--Fear The Me.