Work Worth Doing

“Far and away the best prize that life offers is the chance to work hard at work worth doing.”

– Theodore Roosevelt

I’d been playing club soccer for four years when the famine hit. Our league ran across three states, and played a 12-game regular season, with the upper half of the league meeting for a playoff every year.

In season four, our usual group experienced a huge amount of turnover, with only five of eighteen guys returning. Our new group lacked cohesion and trust, and the best games of our year were the ones we only lost by a goal or two. 0-12 was a bitter pill and eternal three months. We’d eliminated ourselves from the playoffs just over halfway into the season. The last five games were a chance to improve our chemistry, but there was a lot less to be playing for, and it showed in our results. Succeeding at your efforts is simply the surest way to want to try harder. Watching it blow up in your face try after try? Well…

It’s the nature of nearly all collegiate sports programs to go through those feast and famine cycles due to the inevitable turnover they face. The Men’s Basketball teams at Colorado and Colorado State have certainly been no exception. That many programs also only keep their coaches for a few seasons only increases how often you actually catch lightning in a bottle. All of which makes the last couple of seasons for the Buffs and Rams all the more satisfying. Both programs find themselves in the thick of the hunt as their 2020-21 seasons wind down.

The Rams will be grinding out a brutal four-game schedule over the next week, as they try to stay at the front of the race for the Mountain West Conference. Coach Niko Medved has gotten the most from the team in his third season, and if his crew can run this upcoming gauntlet, they could very well find themselves back in the NCAA Tourney for the first time in almost a decade. David Roddy, Isaiah Stevens, Kendle Moore, Adam Thistlewood, and the rest of this tough squad have forged a personality under Medved that has given them new life over the last two seasons. The Rams have built something quickly that has them playing meaningful games as their season wraps to the delight of Fort Collins denizens and CSU fans everywhere.

Bucking the instability trend, Colorado has settled into something good with coach Tad Boyle, with only one of his 11 seasons in Boulder falling below a .500 record, and especially tall task in the Pac-12. Boyle has established his team as a tough out for the likes of UCLA, USC, Arizona, Stanford, and more, and has taken his team to the NCAA Tourney in four out of his first six seasons on the bench. Colorado already swept the season series with conference #1 seed USC last night in a big win. #2 UCLA is all that’s left to wrap up their campaign. McKinley Wright IV and crew might just have rediscovered their 3-point shooting in time, and so the Bruins had better beware. Colorado seems to have USC’s number, having already hung a ten-point loss on the Trojans in L.A. on New Year’s Eve. If CU can avenge a narrow three-point loss to UCLA that came in SoCal two nights later, they should still have some postseason dreams of their own to conquer.

Games that mean something at the end of a hard-fought season during one of the strangest collegiate seasons in decades. That’s good stuff for the teams and their fans alike. The Rams and Buffs have put in the work, and now are getting to reap the rewards of wrapping up their hard-fought seasons with work worth doing.