By Kevin Ellis 

In the past few weeks, a conversation kicked my ass.

It told me to stop moping, stop expecting the good stuff to be handed to me, and stop expecting the good guys to win so easily. To paraphrase the famous words of Boston Celtics basketball coach, Rick Pitino, many years ago, “Martin Luther King, Bobby Kennedy, and Nelson Mandela are not walking through that door.”

This conversation was a radio interview with Morgan Valley, an assistant coach for the University of Connecticut Women’s basketball team that just won its 12th NCAA title. Stick with me, you non-sports fans, because this is not about sports. It’s about commitment, hard work, focus, and sacrifice.

After Valley’s playing career, where she led her high school teams to two state championships and then won three titles with UConn, including an undefeated 34-0 season, she jumped on the coaching train. That is not an easy road. You spend a year or two at various university basketball programs doing scut work: recruiting, breaking down videotape, getting yelled at by the head coach or parents, and looking for housing. That’s all before pulling up stakes to the next college program, where you try to make your mark.

Valley bounced around before landing the head coaching job at the University of Hartford. In her first season, the team won one game. I have been there. Many years ago, I coached a newly formed high school program in Vermont. We won one game over a long, depressing, awful season. (We got better and better and made the playoffs the next year.)

But from that one win season, Valley built up her program and eventually made it back to UConn to sit on the bench this month as the Huskies beat South Carolina to win the title.

So I emailed Coach Valley and asked her to appear on my Vermont Viewpoint radio show to discuss how hard it is to win a championship and how much work it takes to be the best at what you do. Typical Vermonter, she emailed back five minutes later and said she would be happy to join.

Click here to listen to our conversation.

The interview is NOT what you see on TV—star-studded coaches preening for the cameras. My goal was to get Valley to talk about the hard work, the disappointments, and what it takes to reach the top. I kind of failed. Why? As you would expect, Valley deflected praise to the players and paid homage to her head coach, Geno Auriemma.

But what jumped out at me was the pace of the work, the never-ending grind, and dedication to a mission.

Her list of obligations the day after they won the title included recruiting, the WNBA draft, reviewing videotapes of the team’s games, and meetings to plan for next year.

“It never really stops,’’ she said of the work. “It is thankless a lot of time. Away from your families and friends. You miss birthdays. It’s a lot. But when you love something… it is a blessing to be able to have all these experiences. It is a lot of hard work and teamwork, and it works best when you work with people who have the same goals and want the same things as you do. I wouldn’t change it for the world. But it is hard.’’

In coaching high school hoops in Vermont for a decade, I saw up close the work it takes to organize a sports program. I can only imagine what it takes at a place like UConn. Only the best, most dedicated people get to that spot, and only after years of hard work.

It ain’t for the money. I guarantee you.

Valley’s calm determination inspired me. This is a woman who won two state titles and three titles at the highest level in the land as a player. Then she suffered a one-win season before going on to be part of this year’s UConn title run.

There was a quiet grit in her voice that you can hear in the interview. It was, to put it mildly, inspiring. I needed to get up and stop complaining. Sometimes it’s odd that something as silly as sports can change how you see a situation, change how you live your life. But when you talk to people like Morgan Valley, it all starts to make sense.