BYU psychologists changed Mark Pope's approach to team bonding activities on the road

For most of his basketball life, Mark Pope only knew one speed: as fast as possible, all the time.

If he wasn’t always hype-focused on basketball and making it his one and only priority, he didn’t feel like he would be as prepared as he needed to be. “I wonder where I got that from?” He joked during his Wednesday press conference, a clear nod to Rick Pitino, his former college head coach at Kentucky.

“Throughout my whole basketball career as a player and then the first half of my coaching career,” Pope said. “I was about like, ‘How long can you sustain a level 10 intensity and focus?’ I would spend 24 hours a day pacing and criticizing and yelling and being in game mode, full-on intensity, never stop.”

That version of Pope can be tough to envision for Kentucky fans, who have seen nothing but the calm, cool, and collected version of Pope since he took the job. The one who has the Wildcats off to a 10-1 start in his first season coaching his alma mater.

Criticizing and yelling? From this same Mark Pope? I’d have to see it with my own two eyes to believe it. We know he can get intense, but Pope doesn’t come off as someone as anxious as the old version of himself he described above.

The Big Blue Nation can thank some folks at BYU for that, and the advice they shared with Pope (and Jaxson Robinson, too) a few years ago for helping spark a positive change in his approach to coaching.

“I started working with the squad, this group at BYU was four clinical psychology faculty members who have just changed everything I do about coaching,” Pope explained. “So through investigations and studies — and really criticism from them — it just changed the whole way that I actually approach this. And instead of trying to live in that space of being absolute, unfettered, laser-focused every second, emotionally and mentally, on the game and being intense and getting our team ready to go. We kind of flipped to a totally different philosophy, and it’s actually been brilliant. It fits us better now.”

It would surely be tough for someone as obsessed with basketball as Pope to be asked to dial it back. But he took the advice and it’s been paying off ever since. In what ways? Probably not ones you would think. But instead enjoying road trips to the fullest. That’s why Kentucky stopped at the Space Needle and Pike Place Market in Seattle earlier this season. It’s the same reason they toured Times Square and went to see a Broadway play in New York on Thursday night.

Kentucky takes on Ohio State in the Big Apple on Saturday (5:30 p.m. EST) in the CBS Sports Classic. But not everything needs to be all about basketball, all the time.

“The fact that we’re going on a trip to go play a game at Madison Square Garden, and we’re going to do anything that’s not only grit your teeth, full sweat basketball, it was really foreign to me three or four years ago,” Pope said. “But our guys respond to it great now. So this has been a new for me. And the upside is massive.

“And one of the upsides is that this connective tissue that you build on a team that we talk about all the time, it happens, and when you get to put guys in different scenarios and different moments and different environments with new experiences, where everybody’s having a new experience, and they get to share together, and it just builds this collective cohesiveness that I actually think wins in a brilliantly unique way.”

These adventures in new cities are calculated, too. The places they visit and explore are intentional. Pope likes to keep the reasoning to himself. It’s about having fun and seeing new things as a team, not just for the sake of doing something to say they did something.

“It’s all still so uncomfortable for me that we’ve been sweating over this itinerary for the last couple weeks, and I think we got it right,” he continued. “And we have a couple things that are going to be really incredible experiences for our guys. I’m not going to tell you any of them, because I know BBN, and they’ll show up at everything, and that defeats the purpose.”

In no way is that a shot at the BBN, either. If anything, it’s a compliment. Team bonding needs to happen as, well, a team.

Subscribe to the KSR YouTube Channel for press conferences, interviews, original shows, fan features, and exclusive content.