UC San Diego transitions straight into the NCAA field

Heidi VanDerveer will represent the family legacy Tuesday night in Los Angeles when she brings her UC San Diego Tritons on to the floor to face Southern in a First Four game at Pauley Pavilion.

The Tritons (20-15) earned their spot with a run through the Big West Tournament last week, winning not only the first Big West title in school history, but earning their first-ever NCAA berth in their first year of Division I eligibility.

In an impressive bit of symmetry, the women’s squad is celebrating their NCAA accomplishment alongside the men’s team, who earned a No. 12 seed in their first tournament berth (a first in NCAA history) and will open against Michigan.

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“To have this experience with them has been really fun,” said VanDerveer, in her 12th season as the head coach at UCSD. “There is a buzz around campus and it’s all good. For us to do things the way we did and be as tight with the men’s team as well. It’s just such a great time.”

VanDerveer has known plenty of success at UCSD, winning five straight California Collegiate Athletic Conference titles and five NCAA Tounament appearances in Division II from 2016-2020, before the program embarked on its four-year transition to Division I. UC San Diego has had five All-Americans, four conference players of the year and 33 all-conference honorees.

As the program entered its first season as an NCAA eligible Division I team, VanDerveer brought in Vanessa Nygaard, the former Phoenix Mercury head coach and Stanford product, to serve as the associate head coach.

And while the result has been the first winning record they’ve posted since they began their transition four years ago, this season got off to a rough start. UCSD opened the season with seven straight losses, three of those in overtime.

“We were terrible to start the year. Terrible,” VanDerveer said. “We’re young. We do start two seniors, but one is a transfer and the other is a fifth year, who had never been a starter before. Our three or four best players are sophomores. It was not the start we envisioned. But we started to make the transition and we were competitive.”

VanDerveer pointed to a December 21 win over LaSalle as the turning point.

“We beat them and I thought they were a good team,” VanDerveer said. “People came back after the holidays and things just clicked.”

Sophomore guard Sumayah Sugapong, a San Diego native, has led the way on the offensive end, averaging 14.7 points a game, with junior guard Sabrina Ma pitching in 10.1 points and sophomore forward Gracie Gallegos putting up a career-high 24 points in the Big West title game against Davis. Defensively, UCSD is holding opponents to an average of 58 points a game, forcing an average of 20 turnovers.

The Tritons put up a 13-7 record in conference play and headed into the conference tournament having won six of eight before defeating Cal Poly, top-seeded Hawaii and UC Davis to snag an automatic NCAA berth, which in this case, gets the Tritons into a “play-in” game against Southern for the right to face UCLA, the No. 1 overall seed in the tournament on their home floor on Friday.

After winning the Big West title on Saturday in Las Vegas, the team arrived home at 5:30 a.m., got prepped for a not-entirely-expected bracket reveal and then packed their bags again for the trip to Los Angeles, where on Wednesday, they will play their fifth game in 11 days.

“We are so excited to be there,” VanDerveer said. “We had a great tournament run and the Tara in me says, just keep everything positive, right?”

Speaking of Tara — her older sister who happens to be the second-winningest coach in the history of college basketball — she will be in the stands in Pauley on Tuesday night to root on her sister the same way that Heidi has done for Stanford for more than three decades.

Tara VanDerveer admitted she was screaming at the TV over the weekend, watching the games on TV.
“I’m just going to enjoy it,” Heidi VanDerveer said.

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