WATCH: Kentucky basketball visits Dawson Springs

John Calipari is firmly in roster building season. Calipari and his staff are hitting the road to visit multiple AAU events going on throughout the country and are still mining the transfer portal for potential talent to add to the roster. There is no real offseason in big-time college hoops.

However, being the head men’s basketball coach at Kentucky is more than just recruiting and in-game coaching. Quite often, the person holding that title is seen as the biggest influencer in the state. On Thursday, Calipari took some members of the team to Dawson Springs to visit a community that is still trying to recover from a deadly tornado that hit in December.

In a 92-second video, UK is shown visiting the school and doing some great outreach work in the Commonwealth.

"The hardest thing to do is to find light within darkness, and you guys found a way to keep pushing."

On Thursday, we visited with students in Dawson Springs and all of their high school sports teams. 💙 pic.twitter.com/0rrv4oWWI0

— Kentucky Men’s Basketball (@KentuckyMBB) April 22, 2022

On Friday, Calipari jumped on the radio with former Kentucky basketball stalwarts Dan Issel and Mike Pratt. One of the topics discussed was about the visit to Dawson Springs. The Hall of Fame coach knows that the state can’t forget that we’re all Kentuckians, and some of us need some help right now.

“I’m going to tell you, the experience for them and us, what it meant, you could just see it,” Calipari said. “You could feel what it meant there. We also drove around and saw the devastation where whole communities were wiped out. You see the base of the home, but it was total devastation.

“And that community, it’s a lot of poverty. A lot of poverty. And so for us and these guys to go down there and do that — I come back to, none of us should forget. We’ve done things for Haiti and Superstorm Sandy and Houston. This is Kentucky. Our football team, basketball team, all the teams, the coaches, raise money Kelly Craft helped me get matching dollars, and all of a sudden we raised $5.5 million. Well, guess what? We gotta keep going. Whether we do something again next year. For them. We can’t forget. These are our people from our state, from our Commonwealth.”

At the scene, both Calipari and Oscar Tshiebwe spoke to students in the Dawson Springs Independent School System and took photos with some young children in attendance.

Had an unbelievable time today visiting with students in Dawson Springs and all of their high school sports teams.

We heard some really powerful, moving messages from @lanceware55, @Jtoppin0 and @Oscartshiebwe34 too. pic.twitter.com/fG2DWOzGUe

— John Calipari (@UKCoachCalipari) April 21, 2022

Back in December, the university raised over $5 million to help this community that saw most of their town destroyed, but the work is not done. Calipari is committed to use his platform to do what he can to help in situations like this one.

“It’s the impact you can have here if you’re not just sitting behind a desk,” Calipari said. “If you’re not just worried about what everybody’s saying. This is an opportunity here, being at Kentucky. You’re sitting in a seat that can do good. Do you do good? Or do you just sit there and watch tape. I’m hoping when my time has gone, people can look back and not just be about all the winning and all the Final Fours and hopefully more than one national title and all the other stuff, that they say more than that. That program helped everybody within the Commonwealth.