For Mark Pope’s first Kentucky basketball team, this might be the most important thing
Ask anyone associated with the 2024-25 Kentucky basketball team how Mark Pope’s first roster of Wildcats is coming together, and you’re sure to get the same reply.
Splendidly, or some variation thereof, is the stock answer.
Perhaps the biggest question mark surrounding Pope’s first season as UK’s head coach — can he really win big with an entirely new group of players? — isn’t much of a question at all to those on the inside. And it didn’t take these Cats long to come to that conclusion.
Kentucky’s 2024-25 roster currently features 12 scholarship players. Nine are transfers from other schools. Three will be college freshmen. None of the 12 have ever been teammates, none have ever played for UK, and just one has ever been coached by Pope.
That’s a whole lot of new, as anyone following this program already knows.
Yet ask any of those Wildcats — and all of them have indeed been asked — how things are going so far, and the responses have been pretty much the same. Things are going great, they say. Guys are getting along off the court. They’re figuring each other out on the court. And it’s all happening remarkably quickly, considering the circumstances.
“I mean, it’s challenging,” said fifth-year point guard Kerr Kriisa. “That’s why we have the summer. If we didn’t have the summer, it would be super hard.”
If these Cats put together a successful season, they might look back on this summer as the biggest reason.
In the not-too-distant past, college basketball programs were not permitted to participate in organized team activities of any kind over the summer, even though all of the coaches and most of the next season’s roster were all on campus during that time.
Players played pickup games and worked out among themselves. Coaches pined for the day they could join them in the gym.
Finally, in 2012, the NCAA allowed coaches and players to share the practice court in the summer. Back then, every team organized its offseason workouts a little differently.
The rule change that permitted those summer practices has gone through some tweaks over the years, and now — with every coach in America looking for whatever edge he can find — everyone is taking full advantage.
