It is official.
In a widely expected move, Stanford named longtime assistant Kate Paye as the new women’s basketball coach Tuesday. She takes over for her former boss and coaching legend Tara VanDerveer, who announced her retirement last week to cap a 38-season career.
Paye, 50, played four seasons at Stanford from 1991 to 1995 and was an assistant on VanDerveer’s staff for the past 17 seasons. She has been head coach since 2016 and is VanDerveer’s hand-picked successor.
“Stanford women’s basketball is a sisterhood and I am grateful that Kate has been hired to maintain that culture and move the program forward,” VanDerveer said via a Stanford statement. “She has long been ready for this opportunity and is the perfect leader for Stanford during this time of tremendous change in college athletics. Kate was the choice for this job and I am confident she will achieve great success as head coach.”
Paye was part of two national championship teams at Stanford. She won her first as a freshman guard in 1992 in her first of four years as a role player for the Cardinal, during which she was named captain twice. She was associate head coach for the 2021 team that secured VanDerveer’s third and final NCAA title.
Paye played three seasons in the WNBA from 2000 to 2002 before joining the Cardinal in 2007. She had previously held assistant coaching positions at San Diego State and Pepperdine.
Paye will lead the Cardinal into a new era as Stanford moves from the Pac-12 to the ACC. The Bay Area program will join Cal and SMU in the East Coast-based conference next season, in one of the clearest echoes of the conference realignment.
Paye takes over a program that has earned a top-two seed in each of the past five NCAA Tournaments and hasn’t been lower than a No. 4 seed in the last 19.
