[81alum]

I must ask, and I've already asked this before. This seems an awfully lot of changing systems just for a few years and making players, who I also strongly believe are students first, to learn a whole new playbook and philosophy halfway through their collegiate careers. Do other coaches, especially the top tier ones (and this doesn't have to be limited to the women's game or college basketball, for that matter), change things so dramatically so often?

Well, I'd rather Tara answer that question and that some intrepid reporter ask it.  However, I do think there is something unique about Stanford.  Those coaches who perfect a single system for many  years are able to recruit and develop talent specifically for that system.  Tara has shown she can get top players to come to Stanford, but she can't always get top players of a particular type that would fit a particular system.  The Stanford talent pool is a lot smaller than the talent pools for other elite programs, and transfers are almost non-existent.  (Ole Miss was a team built almost entirely out of transfers, for example, another reason I find the loss so galling.)  So for any coach to be successful at Stanford you have to take the best talent you can get and build a system around whatever it is.

Tara herself did not understand this for a long time.  She ran the old Triangle seemingly forever.  She was getting criticized for using this old-school offense and not "modernizing" the team.  Some speculated that perhaps she was too old and too old-fashioned.  But the Triangle was specifically designed to feature marquee post players, and for most of those years we did have those players.  Sometimes we had much more--like Wiggins--who was made more effective by the dominant inside threat.

So what was Tara to do when Chiney graduated?  The balance of talent had shifted from the post to our guards, and continuing to play the triangle had already gotten difficult when we were Chiney and the Chinettes.  So she went to a new system that featured slashing guards like Lili and pull-up guards like Amber. Bonnie and Karlie helped to keep the spacing.  To have stayed with the triangle would have been a disaster at that point, since we had not recruited anyone of the caliber of the Appel/Nneka/Chiney sort.  It probably was not for lack of trying.

Basketball was evolving, too, and the three point shot constantly grew in importance.  The idea of "positionlesss basketball" meant that offenses could be employed that shuffled players interchangeably between the five positions.  This required that everyone be able to pass the ball effectively, and that the "bigs" be able to hit jumpers and especially threes.  Alana Smith was the epitome of this by her senior year, and we were drifting in that positionless direction even before Tara spent a summer with friendly coaches at Davis learning the Princeton and then installing it on our team

The Princeton is a system that is especially good when you have 5 mobile players who all can pass, shoot, and drive.   It also takes at least a year if not two of muscle memory on the part of all players, to the point that the cuts and the passes are completely in sync.  It really is like learning the choreography of a complex ballet.  If your players know it well enough, it does not matter if the defense knows what you are going to do, since your players will always be a split second faster than the defenders can react.  It was, in a sense, the ideal system for Haley Jones, who is a great passer and can play 1-5.  I think it may have been a recruiting tool to convince her to come to Stanford that she could play in such a system.  And after the core of our team learned it well, it took us to a national championship.

Now enter Lauren Betts, also a number one recruit.  The Princeton is exactly, completely, the wrong system for her to be playing in.  I could easily see her asking Tara, "if I come, are you going to keep running the Princeton?"  Also keep in mind that running the Princeton almost guarantees that you can't use any of your freshmen, and given the enormous loss of experience when the Hulls and Wilson graduated you just can't afford to tell your freshmen guards that they can't play for a year.  So it was essential that the Princeton go and something else come in.

So no, I do not fault Tara for switching up our offense.  In fact, I admire her for being creative enough to do it, to learn new things, and to build around the players she has.  We simply had to switch the offense this year, but the particular scheme we switched to did not work.  That is on the coaches.  And I am not the person to say what scheme would have worked better--but the failure of this one is plain to see.

It will be interesting to see if Tara abandons the Flow next year, concluding it would be "good money after bad", or whether she thinks it has just been a steeper learning curve than they expected and they need to stick to it.  Throwing away a whole year of training on the new system will be a momentous decision if they come to it. 

My sense is that it is that the Flow is a lost cause and we need to scrap this offensive scheme and start over.  The reason I say that is that in previous offensive scheme switches there was a learning curve in which we lost games early in the season, but then our team played better together and improved.  In our 2015-16 year, for example, we lost 8 games--significantly worse than this year.  But we improved as the season went on and made it to the elite 8 in the end.  This year was the opposite.  It was defenses against our offense that improved as the season wore on, and we had more and more problems.  Our offense was too easy for defenses to "solve," and they did it better and better as time wore on.  Time for something that instead gives our offense an increasing advantage as our players perfect it.

[81alum]

I must ask, and I've already asked this before. This seems an awfully lot of changing systems just for a few years and making players, who I also strongly believe are students first, to learn a whole new playbook and philosophy halfway through their collegiate careers. Do other coaches, especially the top tier ones (and this doesn't have to be limited to the women's game or college basketball, for that matter), change things so dramatically so often?

Well, I'd rather Tara answer that question and that some intrepid reporter ask it.  However, I do think there is something unique about Stanford.  Those coaches who perfect a single system for many  years are able to recruit and develop talent specifically for that system.  Tara has shown she can get top players to come to Stanford, but she can't always get top players of a particular type that would fit a particular system.  The Stanford talent pool is a lot smaller than the talent pools for other elite programs, and transfers are almost non-existent.  (Ole Miss was a team built almost entirely out of transfers, for example, another reason I find the loss so galling.)  So for any coach to be successful at Stanford you have to take the best talent you can get and build a system around whatever it is.

Tara herself did not understand this for a long time.  She ran the old Triangle seemingly forever.  She was getting criticized for using this old-school offense and not "modernizing" the team.  Some speculated that perhaps she was too old and too old-fashioned.  But the Triangle was specifically designed to feature marquee post players, and for most of those years we did have those players.  Sometimes we had much more--like Wiggins--who was made more effective by the dominant inside threat.

So what was Tara to do when Chiney graduated?  The balance of talent had shifted from the post to our guards, and continuing to play the triangle had already gotten difficult when we were Chiney and the Chinettes.  So she went to a new system that featured slashing guards like Lili and pull-up guards like Amber. Bonnie and Karlie helped to keep the spacing.  To have stayed with the triangle would have been a disaster at that point, since we had not recruited anyone of the caliber of the Appel/Nneka/Chiney sort.  It probably was not for lack of trying.

Basketball was evolving, too, and the three point shot constantly grew in importance.  The idea of "positionlesss basketball" meant that offenses could be employed that shuffled players interchangeably between the five positions.  This required that everyone be able to pass the ball effectively, and that the "bigs" be able to hit jumpers and especially threes.  Alana Smith was the epitome of this by her senior year, and we were drifting in that positionless direction even before Tara spent a summer with friendly coaches at Davis learning the Princeton and then installing it on our team

The Princeton is a system that is especially good when you have 5 mobile players who all can pass, shoot, and drive.   It also takes at least a year if not two of muscle memory on the part of all players, to the point that the cuts and the passes are completely in sync.  It really is like learning the choreography of a complex ballet.  If your players know it well enough, it does not matter if the defense knows what you are going to do, since your players will always be a split second faster than the defenders can react.  It was, in a sense, the ideal system for Haley Jones, who is a great passer and can play 1-5.  I think it may have been a recruiting tool to convince her to come to Stanford that she could play in such a system.  And after the core of our team learned it well, it took us to a national championship.

Now enter Lauren Betts, also a number one recruit.  The Princeton is exactly, completely, the wrong system for her to be playing in.  I could easily see her asking Tara, "if I come, are you going to keep running the Princeton?"  Also keep in mind that running the Princeton almost guarantees that you can't use any of your freshmen, and given the enormous loss of experience when the Hulls and Wilson graduated you just can't afford to tell your freshmen guards that they can't play for a year.  So it was essential that the Princeton go and something else come in.

So no, I do not fault Tara for switching up our offense.  In fact, I admire her for being creative enough to do it, to learn new things, and to build around the players she has.  We simply had to switch the offense this year, but the particular scheme we switched to did not work.  That is on the coaches.  And I am not the person to say what scheme would have worked better--but the failure of this one is plain to see.

It will be interesting to see if Tara abandons the Flow next year, concluding it would be "good money after bad", or whether she thinks it has just been a steeper learning curve than they expected and they need to stick to it.  Throwing away a whole year of training on the new system will be a momentous decision if they come to it. 

My sense is that it is that the Flow is a lost cause and we need to scrap this offensive scheme and start over.  The reason I say that is that in previous offensive scheme switches there was a learning curve in which we lost games early in the season, but then our team played better together and improved.  In our 2015-16 year, for example, we lost 8 games--significantly worse than this year.  But we improved as the season went on and made it to the elite 8 in the end.  This year was the opposite.  It was defenses against our offense that improved as the season wore on, and we had more and more problems.  Our offense was too easy for defenses to "solve," and they did it better and better as time wore on.  Time for something that instead gives our offense an increasing advantage as our players perfect it.