Valley knows first-hand what a good coach Barnes is
SAN ANTONIO — Morgan Valley will be pulling for her alma mater, UConn, in the women’s Final Four on Friday.
But she’ll also have a soft spot for Arizona, coached by one of her best friends in the profession, Adia Barnes.
“She’s just fun to be around,” Valley said. “You just always laugh when you’re with her.”
It was Valley — now 39 and two years into her stint leading Hartford — who helped Barnes climb the Power 5 ladder. They were together on Mike Neighbors’ staff when Washington made the national semifinals in 2016, and Barnes later hired Valley as an assistant at Arizona.
“It’s kind of remarkable,” Valley said. “I’ve worked for two people in Mike
Neighbors and Adia who both verbalize their goals and then attain them. It’s cool to see the power of that, putting that out there and getting people to believe in it.”
Prior to this tournament, the deepest Arizona had advanced was the Sweet 16 in 1998: Barnes’ senior year, when the Wildcats ironically lost to UConn.
Barnes was then, as she is now, tough and driven.
She was undersized in the post at 5-foot-11, but still managed to win Pac-12 Player of the Year, and from there went on to play professionally both in the WNBA and overseas. That included a stint alongside UConn alumna Sue Bird on the 2004 WNBA champion Seattle Storm.
“I couldn’t be more happy for Adia,” said Bird, who is in San Antonio for a
Team USA mini-camp. “The minute she got that job (at Arizona), you just knew she was going to have success because that’s her personality. If you’re around Adia for five seconds, she’s got charisma. She makes you feel like you’ve known her forever. As a recruiter, as somebody building a program … those are things you can’t teach.”
Valley knows that as well as anybody. She first met Barnes in 2002 while visiting Bird, her former
UConn teammate, in Seattle. Valley landed her first gig as an assistant at Holy Cross in 2005, and Bird reconnected her with Barnes years later when the latter expressed an interest in getting into coaching.
“Kevin McGuff had hired her out at Washington, so she would call me all the time about recruiting and organizing it, just playerdevelopment stuff,” Valley said. “We would just talk all the time about everything. That’s kind of how it started.
“We would work together at Washington, and then
she asked me to come down to Arizona.”
Valley declined at first, choosing to stick around for Washington’s run to the Sweet 16 in 2017. But the next season, Valley reunited with Barnes in Arizona — albeit under a slightly different arrangement with Barnes as head coach.
“Things that maybe I could joke about before, I had to not joke about those things,” Valley said. “It didn’t change that much, but there were some things — she’s your boss and there’s other people, it was different. But the friendship still stayed.”
To the point where Barnes let Valley live with her for three months, just as she did when they were colleagues in Washington.
“Her and Salvo (Barnes’ husband and an assistant coach at Arizona), they had just had Matteo, their first child. They were headed to Italy,” Valley said. “They would usually go for two to three weeks so Salvo could see his family and so the kids could see his family. They were like, ‘You could stay here as long as you need.’ Same thing when I moved out to Arizona, they had an extra room. And so I got to crash there. I
cooked dinner, I took out the trash, and yeah, I cleaned up. I held my own.”
Valley ended up moving a block away.
“I lived on the opposite side of the main street,” Valley said. “So I’d just walk across the street when a recruit needed to talk to her and hand her the phone, and go hang out with Matteo and Salvo until she was done, or all three of us would get on the call. It made it pretty easy.”