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Kentucky coach Mark Pope on how team can find the joys in basketball
Kentucky basketball coach Mark Pope discusses how players should care about something more than themselves to find the joys in basketball with their team.
- Kentucky basketball coach Mark Pope is changing his approach to summer workouts in his second season.
- This season’s team is prioritizing defensive fundamentals over intricate offensive strategies, unlike last year.
- Pope emphasizes a “100 percent” effort on every possession, even if it means disrupting practice.
LEXINGTON — More than midway through the eight weeks of summer workouts permitted by the NCAA, Mark Pope admitted he was “a little twisted up” with the way he’d gone about structuring the allocated time. Now entering his second season as Kentucky basketball’s coach, Pope learned from his first year on the job.
It starts at practice.
Last year, when UK and its crew of 12 newcomers convened for its summer sessions, Pope’s staff was intentional in how it taught offensive and defensive concepts. Put another way, the Wildcats of last year were more “game ready” than the 2025-26 version at the same juncture of the summer.
“We had a better feeling (last year) of what to get to — (options) A, B, C and D — and how to make those decisions,” Pope said July 21.
It’s a trade-off.
Where this season’s team lacks intricate knowledge of, say, reads and progressions in Pope’s transition offense strategies, it’s well ahead in defensive fundamentals and tenacity — areas that posed problems for the 2024-25 club much of the season.
“One of the things we have to do is our defensive field-goal percentage has got to be better next year,” Pope said. “And so we’re dedicated to having a legal contest on every single field-goal attempt — every single one. And so there’s a lot of things that go into that, but that’s a major point of emphasis for us.”
So much so, Pope said, that UK is willing to eschew a given day’s practice plan at a moment’s notice.
“One of our key ideas this year, one of our ‘100 percents,’ is living to a standard every single possession,” he said. “And so we are going to blow up practice more often than we did last year. We’ll get stuck, because we’re not going to move on until we … live up to the standard we have.”
That exact scenario unfolded during one workout this summer. During the session in question, the Wildcats had split into two groups. The first group, Pope conceded, “struggled.” Those issues derailed the rest of the practice.
Yet two positives sprang forth.
“One, our guys didn’t quit,” Pope said. “The gym was full of frustration. It was not a happy place (that) morning for the first group, but the guys didn’t quit. They kept trying to work through it until they got there. Kept trying to listen and understand and kind of grasp onto what we were trying to accomplish.
“The second nice thing that happened … was the second group witnessed the last 15 minutes of misery of the first group, and so they came onto the court with a whole different, renewed determination to do it right on the first rep.”
Pope vows the resolve to constantly improve is evident in other respects, too.
Though coaches only can be around players eight hours a week during the summer — of which only four can include on-court instruction — there are no limitations for the athletes themselves.
“They’re spending a lot of time on the court, outside of practice, doing individual work, getting groups together to come get group shooting workouts or whatever it is they have going,” Pope said. “It feels like there are guys in the gym all day long.”
The chemistry extends off the court. That’s why Pope said the Wildcat Coal Lodge is “a gift” from above. The residence hall for the men’s basketball program, the Lodge is the perfect Petri dish.
“They just bump into each other,” Pope said. “And the goal in this eight weeks is for all of them to get to the point where they really annoy each other and they want to kill each other because somebody’s left their stuff out, or somebody’s not emptying their trash, or somebody’s playing their music too loud, or all those things where you really get to know each other. I think (that is) happening.”
When players aren’t joking around with each other, they’re involved in learning more about Lexington and the state as a whole. Pope made sure the first three weekends of the summer were chock-full of “getting out and serving in the community.”
That’s not all.
“We’ve had an event every week where the guys have been super willing and dedicated and passionate to serve,” Pope said. “The fact that they’re getting to do that together, I think there’s a magical currency there where guys grow to know each other better when they’re serving.”
In Pope’s eyes, it’s a sign.
“I think they have the flavor and the juice to be really coachable. I think we have a conglomeration of guys here who understand what Kentucky is, who understand our desperate desire to get better and have the humility to do it,” he said. “I think we do. The humility is always a sliding scale, but I think we’re living in the humble space right now where guys are able to actually take in new information and get better.”
The alterations to his practice philosophy, Pope acknowledged, are a gamble. But an educated wager.
He’s confident it’ll pay off soon enough.
“I’m proud of where the guys are right now,” he said. “We still have a long way to go. We’ve still got to put a lot of capital in the bank to prepare for the stresses and duress of the season, but we’re heading the right direction.”
Reach Kentucky men’s basketball and football reporter Ryan Black at rblack@gannett.com and follow him on X at @RyanABlack.
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