Breaking news;Mark Pope is excited to hire mega Five-Star to wildcat his going to help Kentucky…
Breaking news;Mark Pope is excited to hire mega Five-Star to wildcat his going to help Kentucky…
With practice starting Monday, the team will be allowed to have four hours per week of on-court instruction for the next eight weeks, according to NCAA rules. The Wildcats who will make up Pope’s first roster — all 12 scholarship players on the 2024-25 team are newcomers — are now on campus in Lexington, with veteran center Amari Williams the last to arrive over the weekend following his graduation from Drexel University.
The only returnees from John Calipari’s final season with the Cats will be walk-ons Grant Darbyshire and Walker Horn — they’ve played a total of 16 minutes, combined, over the past two seasons — and none of the other 12 players have ever been college teammates. Only one, Jaxson Robinson, a transfer from BYU, has ever played for Pope.
The season is still about five months away, but the practice time between now and then will be precious, and Pope acknowledged Saturday that getting this team to mesh is priority number one.
“That’s going to be the
Pope, his new coaching staff, and the 2024-25 roster hit the court Monday for the first practice of the summer session, another milestone in this new era of UK basketball.
“I’m really excited,” Pope said over the weekend. “We have dug really, really deep into everything we can know about our team and about our guys and about putting this together. We need more data, right? And we need more time. It’s like time and data to — you guys are going to get tired of me talking about connective tissue, but to build the connective tissue and the special sauce of what makes teams great.
“And so I’m just grateful that we’re here right now and that we can start doing that in massive earnest. I think this team has way more potential than maybe people think. And the question is, how good can we be in tapping into it and helping all the pieces fit together with a synergy that makes our whole way bigger than the sum of our parts
The past two months in the world of Kentucky basketball have been anything but dull.
From the surprising hire of Mark Pope as the Wildcats’ new head coach to his electric reintroduction to UK fans two days later and the sprint through a spring filled with acquisitions for his first season in charge of the program, there’s been no shortage of action off the court.
Now, finally, the time is here to actually play a little ball.
