Tara Heiss, the lightning-quick point guard and Women’s Basketball Hall of Famer who in 1978 led Maryland to within a win of a national title, died Friday at 66, her sister, Mary Heiss, confirmed. No cause of death was given.
“I was mostly a shooter when I came to Maryland,” Heiss told The Washington Post in 1977. “Then I started working on my passing. I’d just try things out and if they worked, I’d keep doing them. The only reason I didn’t show some of them off earlier was because I didn’t know how my coaches would like them.”
As a senior in 1978, Heiss was named MVP of the first ACC women’s basketball tournament before leading Maryland to the Association for Intercollegiate Athletics for Women tournament championship game against UCLA. (The NCAA didn’t stage its first women’s basketball championship until 1982.) In front of a partisan crowd of 9,351 at UCLA’s Pauley Pavilion and without one of their best defenders, Jane Zivalich, who was injured in the previous game, Coach Chris Weller’s Terrapins lost, 90-74. Heiss, who had scored 20 points in Maryland’s 92-88 win over the Bruins in College Park during the regular season, finished with 12 points and nine assists.
Maryland’s run to the title game helped put the program on the map and attracted a wave of recruits over the next decade.
“She brought a lot of joy to everyone that played with her, and to me, she is the pioneer of Maryland women’s basketball,” said former Terps guard Martha Hastings, who shared a backcourt with Heiss at Walter Johnson and Maryland. “People wanted to come play at Maryland because of Tara. She was a great teammate, and I just feel so lucky to have known her.”
Hastings, who graduated a year before Heiss and served as an assistant coach for the 1978 Maryland team that lost to UCLA in the championship game, said Heiss had a devastating Eurostep move that her teammates called a “bunny hop” and could throw the ball the length of the court behind her back. Heiss also had a sense of humor, which was on display before Maryland met three-time defending AIAW champion Immaculata College in the first nationally televised women’s college basketball game during her freshman year.
“I remember we had to fill out a form so the broadcasters knew some information about us,” Hastings said. “So, like, your height, your eyes. And then it said hair, and Tara wrote down ‘wild.’ We said, ‘Are you going to leave it like that?’ She said, ‘Yes, it’s the best description of it.’ She never tied her hair back until the middle of her sophomore year when an opposing team complained about it.”
Beginning in high school, Heiss and Hastings honed their skills playing pickup basketball against boys on outdoor courts in Montgomery County. At Maryland, Heiss’s flashy playmaking ability drew comparisons to Terps men’s point guard Brad Davis, a first-round pick of the Los Angeles Lakers in 1977.
“She was like the Bob Cousy of women’s basketball, the first one with super flair,” Hastings said. “And she probably could outshoot Cousy.”
“With her no-look passes and the way she could take control of the game, she was unbelievable,” said Jon Stratton, a student manager for the Maryland women’s basketball team from 1976 to 1978. “She was so much fun to be around and was always doing things for others. She never had an ego about her athletic ability. She was more just interested in challenging herself.”
Heiss, who was among the final cuts of the 1976 U.S. Olympic team, maintained her amateur status after graduating from Maryland to pursue a spot on the 1980 squad. She made the team and competed in several international competitions, but part of her dream was denied when the United States boycotted the Moscow Games. Mary Heiss still remembers returning home with Tara and their mom from a ceremony at the White House, where President Jimmy Carter presented roughly 400 U.S. Olympians with gold-plated medals as a sign of his appreciation during the Olympics they couldn’t attend.
“She handled all of that really well,” Mary said of her younger sister, who is also survived by a younger brother, John “Kip” Heiss. “She was never devastated by the downturns in her career.”
Heiss played for the New Jersey Gems of the Women’s Professional Basketball League and the Virginia Wave of the short-lived Women’s American Basketball Association in the early 1980s and had brief stints as an assistant coach at Maryland and Towson. She was inducted to the Women’s Basketball Hall of Fame in 2003, and her No. 44, the same digits worn by her idol, Paul Westphal, hangs in the rafters of Maryland’s Xfinity Center. (During her senior year at Maryland, Heiss mentioned her admiration for Westphal in an interview with The Post. The former NBA guard, who was playing for the Phoenix Suns at the time, got word of it and called Heiss to invite her to work one of his basketball camps.)
A 1996 inductee in the Greater Washington Fastpitch Softball Hall of Fame, Heiss, who lived in Wheaton, worked as a courier for FedEx for nearly 30 years before retiring in 2018. In recent years, her sister said she developed a love of yardwork and gardening and practically treated mowing the lawn as a competitive sport.
“Throughout all of the accolades she received over the years, she always remained humble and unassuming,” Mary Heiss said. “Her greatest joy was playing basketball and competing for the love of the game. She kind of shied away from the limelight.”