Jeff Sheppard details son's unexpected ride as a one-and-done at Kentucky

We all had that moment last year watching Reed Sheppard in his debut season with the Kentucky Wildcats. Maybe it was in Toronto in July when he exploded at the GLOBL JAM or in the Champions Classic when he knocked down a trio of triples en route to 13 points and four steals on the big stage against top-ranked Kansas? How about his first 20-point game against Stonehill? He went for 25 on 9-10 shooting and 7-8 from three in that one, adding seven assists and three steals — as close to a perfect all-around effort you’ll find. For some, it was still a wait-and-see game until SEC play to see if the production was sustainable.

At one point or another, it hit you that the little boy from Kentucky who planned on wearing blue and white all four years may just be a one-and-done. When did that moment come for Jeff Sheppard, a two-time national champion and former Final Four Most Outstanding Player in his own right?

He can pinpoint the moment life got pretty hectic for the Sheppards this past season.

“I don’t know that I have a moment. We started getting bombarded from the NBA personnel after the Kentucky-Miami game, Reed kind of exploded on the scene in a key national television game,” he told KSR. “The way that he did it, everybody kind of had an eye on him. Reed, for the last five years, it has been, ‘He can do this, but…’ ‘He can do this, but…’ He kind of answered a lot of those questions, even for himself and Coach Cal and us and everything. Not that we were questioning him, but he still had to kind of live that out.”

Sheppard went for 21 points on 8-13 shooting and 5-9 from three with five rebounds, four assists and three steals in the blowout win, a statement against a top-ten Miami team in the ACC/SEC Challenge. It was the turning point for Jeff and Stacey, when the realization hit that this may be their new reality.

“From that moment on, it was a blur. It was truly every single day, something going on,” Sheppard said. “We were trying to keep everything from Reed, because we wanted him to be able to enjoy Kentucky. We didn’t want this on his mind, he didn’t want it on his mind, so we were able to keep it from him.”

Reed wasn’t ignorant to the hype — it was impossible to avoid it entirely when you’re projected as the potential No. 1 overall pick, one of the most unlikely rises to draft superstardom in recent memory. But his parents did their best to shield him from the clutter that comes with that growth, pro conversations limited exclusively to Jeff and Stacey in private.

When the former four-star guard said he “never thought about after college until after the season,” he meant it.

“Obviously, as time went on, he knew about all of the mock drafts and you have people talking, so he’s not oblivious to that. But at the same time, we had no meetings with him. We had no conversations about it,” Sheppard told KSR. “Stacey and I consumed ourselves to sitting down and listening. We had to relearn the whole process. As the season went on, it was like, this has a chance to happen, so we’ve got to be ready. We’ve got to be dialed in and ready to help him. If he says, ‘I want to leave,’ we can’t say, ‘OK, well, let’s start.'”

They’d be lying if they said that part wasn’t hard. Like many, they expected this process to take years, not months.

“We weren’t expecting Reed to be one-and-done at all,” he added. “We were planning on being here for four years.”

So when the joy of watching their son suit up for their alma mater overlapped with the stress of unexpected draft conversations, games created quite the swing of emotions for that famous couple sitting in the stands with cameras pointed in their direction after every big play.

“That was hard having to kind of go through the meat of the season, trying to — we’re pulling for Kentucky, but yet, was he 2-4 from the three-point line? How many steals did he get? What are the NBA analytics going to think about all of that? You have all of that going on in your mind,” Sheppard said. “You try to block it out, but it was difficult. Still, what an incredible ride. What an awesome, awesome run. We had so, so much fun.”

Then came the surprise transition from John Calipari to Mark Pope, Reed’s college coach out and Jeff’s former college roommate and teammate in. If there was one human being who could pull the National Freshman of the Year and likely top-five pick out of the draft, Pope would have to be in the conversation.

Thing is, Sheppard had already decided privately at that point he was forgoing the remainder of his eligibility to turn pro.

“Reed had already made a decision in his mind what he wanted to do,” Jeff told KSR. “It wasn’t public yet, but he had already made a decision. So Mark kind of had it unfair going into this.”

That doesn’t mean the Sheppards didn’t hear Pope out — they wanted to see how those conversations would go, just in case. And the new Kentucky coach took his shot, all the way down to Pope having the superstar guard’s return written into his contract.

Well, kind of.

“As soon as he got the job, we connected. Matter of fact, I talked to him the night that things started brewing, and he made a great joke,” Sheppard said. “He said, ‘I’m negotiating my contract. Do I need to get it in writing that Reed is coming back or is it just a done deal?’ So in Mark Pope fashion, even in that moment, he (made the most of it).

“But then I said, ‘Here he is, you talk to him on the phone.’ We did some FaceTimes with him because Reed was already out in California, but again, Reed had kind of already made up his mind.”

A move to the NBA was inevitable, a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity the Sheppards simply couldn’t pass up. Pope knew that, Jeff and Stacey knew that and Reed knew that. The former McDonald’s All-American caught lightning in a bottle and had no choice but to keep it (and the $45.8 million rookie contract that came with it).

Had Sheppard made the decision to turn down the NBA, though, his dad is confident there was only one school in his heart. There would have been no transfer portal or going to the highest bidder, no following Coach Cal to Arkansas — no matter how much the Sheppards love Calipari.

He would have played for Mark Pope and the Kentucky Wildcats.

“I do think had Reed returned to school, he would have returned to Kentucky, 100 percent. 100 percent,” Jeff told KSR. “As much as he loves Coach Cal — and we love Coach Cal — I do think he would have stayed at Kentucky. There just wasn’t really an opportunity, Mark didn’t have a fair opportunity to really make a plea. He had to pull out of that decision and back into this.”

Would they have changed anything with a do-over? His status as the favorite to win NBA Rookie of the Year says Sheppard made the right call.

“Now looking at how everything has played out,” Jeff said, “it probably wouldn’t have been a good decision for him to make [laughs].”