Kentucky's trip to Georgia will be a homecoming for Mark Fox and Mark Pope

Kentucky will play its first SEC road game of the season Tuesday night at Georgia. The trip to Athens will also serve as a homecoming of sorts for two members of Kentucky’s staff. Associate coach Mark Fox was Georgia’s head coach from 2009 to 2018. In Fox’s first season, he hired Mark Pope as the Bulldogs’ assistant director of basketball operations.

By now, you’re familiar with the story. After three years at Columbia Medical School, Pope decided to change course and pursue coaching. Fox, who got his coaching start at Washington under Lynn Nance when Pope was a freshman in 1991, was his first call. Pope begged Fox to give him a chance, and after some hesitation, Fox did. Pope spent a year on Fox’s staff, making $24,000, a far cry from whatever salary he could have earned as a neurosurgeon.

During that season, 2009-10, Georgia went 14-17 and finished sixth in the SEC. The Bulldogs had wins over three ranked opponents, all at home: No. 20 Georgia Tech, No. 8 Tennessee, and No. 18 Vanderbilt. While on Fox’s staff, Pope learned coaching from the ground up, taking on the menial tasks of doing the players’ laundry, setting up tailgates for visiting recruits, etc. At first, he lived in Fox’s basement before his wife Lee Anne and daughters moved down from New York. One weekend, Lee Anne and the girls surprised him with Fox and his wife Cindy’s help.

“[Fox was] like, ‘I’ll get him here. You just come, and I’ll get him here,'” Lee Anne recalled in an interview with KSR in October. “We did the drive in two days and we pulled up, and Cindy grabbed me and I remember Coach Fox saying, ‘I’ll park your car on the side.’ And I’m like, no because there’s Cheerios and diapers in the car, literally. So we hid the car, and then we were in the back by the pool, and he had figured out a way to get Mark to walk in. And Mark walked in — I could cry — Mark walked in that backyard and the girls just ran to him. It was such a sweet moment.”

When Pope’s family finally moved their belongings to Athens, Fox and the entire coaching staff helped them unpack the moving truck. It wouldn’t be long before they were packing it again, this time heading to Winston-Salem to work for Jeff Bzdelik, one of Pope’s former NBA coaches, at Wake Forest. Although Pope’s time on Fox’s staff was brief, Fox saw promise.

“He obviously has great basketball experience,” Fox told the Herald-Leader’s Ben Roberts in April. “And so he had very valuable input as we took over Georgia. I don’t think he adopted the style he has now over those first couple of years. I think it took him time to adopt that. But he had great input. And he has terrific knowledge. So he was really an asset for us as we got started.”

In 2011, Fox took Georgia back to the NCAA Tournament, one of two trips the Bulldogs would make during his nine years in Athens. That season, they also upset No. 11 Kentucky in Stegeman Coliseum 77-70, the first of Fox’s two wins vs. the Cats. Fox finished his career at Georgia with a 163-133 record and led the Bulldogs to four 20-win seasons, which is tied for the most by a head coach in school history. From 2014-17, Georgia won a total of 80 games – the second-winningest four-year stretch in program history – and the Bulldogs’ 42 SEC wins and 54 home wins over the span are the most ever at the school. Fox helped three players make it to the NBA: Travis Leslie, Trey Thompkins, and Kentavious Caldwell-Pope.

After parting ways with the Bulldogs in 2018, Fox spent four years as the head coach at Cal and then a season on Georgetown’s staff as the Director of Student-Athlete Relations and NIL Partnerships, with various stints with USA Basketball and the NBA Summer League mixed in. Now, he’s back with Pope, working as an associate coach.

“I can’t believe that I get to work with Mark Fox,” Pope said when he announced Fox’s hire in April. “Our relationship began at the University of Washington when I was a freshman and ever since then, he has been an incredible mentor to me over the years. He even hired me for my first job.”

Tomorrow will be Fox’s first game back at Georgia since leaving in 2018. I’m sure that when he and Pope walk into Stegeman Coliseum, emotions will be running high. Yet another cool moment in a full-circle season.