Mark Pope shares the moment he knew this Kentucky team would come together and it came well-away from court

The Kentucky Wildcats are off to a hot start in their first season under head coach Mark Pope. That extended now into beating one of their biggest rivals, the Louisville Cardinals, on Saturday.

After that win against Louisville, Pope shared that he knew this team would come together and perform well based on how they’ve interacted away from the court itself.

“I think it’s been when I’ve seen the guys off the court actually more than on the court,” Mark Pope said. “I think we have a really good sense of off the court, on the court, the guys’ skill set. We are still learning how to do it. Like tonight, there was this – there are so many moments when our – our ceiling is so much higher than we are right now in terms of the way we execute and understanding why we are doing it. We have so much growth we can do.” 

As an example of how this Kentucky team came together, Mark Pope shared that the team’s attitude toward an act of service they did in the offseason showed him how the Wildcats had a good attitude as a group.

“But I think it was a couple of moments that I talked about a lot where I saw, during the summer, guys going out of their way to really go be together. Andrew Carr is like the dad of the team and he has been incredible. And Lamont Butler takes care of each of these guys one by one. I can’t tell you how many stories I’ve heard about someone is having a tough time and all of a sudden Lamont shows up and he’s gone way out of his way to actually just reroute that person’s day and the way he feels and we went on a service retreat to Eastern Kentucky and there was a couple of things I saw that I loved,” Pope said.

“One, you know, it wasn’t the guys’ idea to go do some reconstruction projects on some of these flooded-out areas. They went and, you know it was a two-and-a-half day affair but it was still 8 or 10 hours of work a day and there wasn’t a single moment where anybody was hiding. The staff, we all finished that and were shaking our heads and were like, ‘Man, we didn’t have anybody hiding. We never had anybody complaining.’ The guys, it wasn’t like their favorite thing in the world to do but they were like we are here and we are going to work for 10 hours and we are going to work for 10 hours tomorrow. You see things like that.”

To this point in the season, Kentucky is 10-1, with all of those wins coming in non-conference play. Their only loss came in a close game on the road against a ranked Clemson team.

“At the end of that, we had a devotional where the guys each made one very specific commitment to the team out loud just with only the team there. You heard how thoughtful the guys were about what they were going to give to the team this year,” Pope said. “And you see Lamont, we got a chance man and we have staying power and some resilience and we have unbelievable young guys. Unbelievable. It’s very cool. Good group.”

Mark Pope and Kentucky will look to keep up their winning ways against Ohio State on December 21st.