Mark Pope says he has the healthiest team of his head coaching career

Injuries are an unfortunate part of sports. Kentucky men’s basketball has been no outlier in that regard over the years. But new head coach Mark Pope is trying to change that with a thorough approach to keeping his first Kentucky team as healthy as possible. It’s still early in the season and there was a minor scare with Amari Williams‘ knee during the preseason, but overall, the Wildcats are about as healthy as they can be right now.

“We’re always playing with health. This is the healthiest I’ve had a team at this point in the season,” Pope said after Kentucky’s season-opening win over Wright State. “This is the healthiest of any team I’ve had in my decade-long head-coaching, give or take a year or two. And we’ve been really meticulous.”

Get ready to see the word “meticulous” a few more times from Pope throughout the rest of this article.

Pope joked that Rick Pitino, who coached him at Kentucky during the program’s 1996 national championship run, isn’t allowed to return to practices anymore because of how particular Pope has been. “(Pitino) was like, you’re so soft,” he said with a laugh. But there’s a long season ahead of Kentucky. Pope’s system requires lots of conditioning. He likes to use his bench depth. You need a healthy roster to make that happen.

“We are being meticulous,” Pope added. “We are measuring everything through Catapult. We are measuring our player load and their active load and running load and their dynamic load and we are trying to map it out and plan it out.”

Catapult is a sports performance analytics company based out of Australia founded in 2006. Essentially, it’s wearable technology that helps Kentucky’s trainers and coaches track everything from performance to workload to development to movement and everything else. It creates patterns that the staff can, ideally, learn from and use to prevent issues from arising.

Pope brought in Randy Towner and Brandon Wells to lead his performance team in Lexington. Towner, Kentucky’s head strength coach, spent the last two seasons with the Milwaukee Bucks. Wells, who holds the title of senior athletic trainer, was at Vanderbilt from 2018-24. There is a huge focus right now on conditioning and ensuring that every player on the roster can get their bodies to the point they need to be by the end of the season.

“We are being incredibly meticulous actually with how we are trying to grow our guys’ conditioning,” Pope continued. “It is very different than what I have experienced. We still have a long way to go to get in shape and play the way we want to play. Fortunately, we are going to lean on our depth right now until our conditioning really catches up.  We are trying to do that one step at a time so we don’t have too acute an uphill trajectory in terms of our conditioning growth.”

Pope played 10 guys for more than 14 minutes during the season-opener against Wright State. Only Otega Oweh (27 minutes) played more than 22 minutes. Certain situations will call for a tighter rotation as the season moves along, but a 10-man rotation is the number he envisions. He needs everyone to stay healthy for that to happen.

“I would like to live in this 10 space as long as the game will let us.”

We won’t pretend that injuries still won’t happen this season. A turned ankle can be out of anyone’s control. But Pope is going out of his way to keep those from happening as often as possible.