Kentucky Coach Mark Pope shares how to get a team of new faces to come together

Mark Pope did a great job of getting this Kentucky team to get close fast.

Kentucky’s Mark Pope held its annual media day at the Joe Craft Center. Oct. 8, 2024 / Scott Utterback/Courier Journal / USA TODAY NETWORK via Imagn Images

When a new coach is hired in college basketball, generally, there is a lot of roster turnover, and that was the case this offseason for the Kentucky Wildcats. Coach Pope had to put together a brand new roster, and this was done mostly in the transfer portal.

The hard part of doing this is getting a group of a lot of players who don't know each other well to bond off the floor and become brothers. If this can't be done, it will be hard to have that connection on the court. Coach Mark Pope went out of his way to make sure this wouldn't be an issue for his first Kentucky team.

At his recent media day press conference, Coach Pope talked about how he and the staff went about putting together a competitive roster via the portal and getting these players to create a brotherhood.

This is what Coach Pope had to say about bringing a team with a lot of new faces together, "We're working really hard on that. The first four or five weeks, we got a lot of -- we try to put the guys in the huddle and be, like, go handle it. And there was a lot of blank stares. Of course, there was because guys hadn't learned our terminology and vernacular. They hadn't learned kind of how we see the game. And so what's fun is, in the past, it's kind of like you take a player, and you get him for a year and you talk to him and at him for a year and he starts to digest it. And then you know you're making progress when he starts to actually repeat the words. So we've just tried so hard to expedite that process, almost like -- I've talked about this a lot in medical school. So, see one, do one, teach one, that process. So our guys have really done an unbelievable job expediting that in a lot of different areas where I'm really proud of how they're working and it's becoming almost natural, instinctive to come into a huddle or on the floor to communicate. Now, we have simple places where we're still like, you know, declaring the ball in transition -- defense has been a major principle for us the last couple of weeks, and we're thinking about it so much that we get distracted by the most simple concept. We still have plays where we have massive growth to do. But I've been really proud overall of the guys progress."