Mark Pope's favorite part about being at Kentucky? "The people I get to be around."

Mark Pope will be the first to tell you he would not be coaching at all had he not transferred from Washington to become a Wildcat in 1994. He nearly didn’t anyway, enrolling in medical school at Columbia University as a Rhodes Scholar candidate before he quit to ‘fold laundry and hand out water’ as ‘the assistant to the operations guy’ under Mark Fox at Georgia. Then the rest was history.

He credits that change of heart, though, to Rick Pitino for building a culture during their time together in Lexington. Pope may not have felt that desire to coach while he was running wind sprints in a Kentucky uniform, but it hit him after the dust settled on his playing days that his calling was to follow in Coach P’s footsteps.

“When I was here at Kentucky, there was no way in the world I was ever going to become a coach. Never,” Pope said during his call-in radio show Monday night. “I think that my teammates all probably were occupying a little bit of the same head space. I think what happens a lot on teams with great culture and players that got to play for one of the greatest coaches ever.

“More than half of us have jumped into coaching in one way or another, and several guys are still coaching at the college level or affiliated with organizations at the professional level. I think, to me, that’s an incredible attribute to Coach Pitino.”

As he felt his life take him down the medical path, there was something pulling him back to basketball that he couldn’t escape. That’s where coaching entered the picture, even if it meant taking a low-end job under Fox to get his feet wet.

“I think what happens is when you get through the grind of the process, as hard as it was and as demanding and brilliant and wonderful as it was, it doesn’t take very many minutes or hours or days post-experience here where you start to realize the impact that Coach had in each of our lives,” he continued. “You realize it more every single day that goes on what a special experience was. It didn’t take me long, I kind of played for a long time and then went in another direction, but my heart was always calling me back to hoops. I think there’s a good chance that had I not come to Kentucky, I never would have coached.”

Fast forward 15 years — he joined the Georgia staff in 2009 — and he found himself back at his Old Kentucky Home as the face of the biggest brand in college basketball. Funny how life works, right?

Well into his first year on the job, what’s been his favorite part being at his alma mater? It’s hard to narrow down, but there is one constant in all of it: the people.

The job is consuming and takes everything he’s got to give, but he enjoys every second of it because of the people that enter his life because of it. That includes administration, staff, his players, and you, Big Blue Nation.

That’s his ‘why.’

“Man, that’s really hard to say. I think it’s the best job in all of basketball — I don’t think there’s any job that comes close,” Pope said. “It’s not the easiest job, it’s a hard job, but it’s the best job. The thing that makes it the best job is the people that I get to be around. It’s these players that kind of filter themselves out. We get really special players here.

“It’s BBN, it’s this fan base, because this — you know, for 100 different reasons, there’s some type of generational relationship between people in this community and Kentucky basketball that means a lot, and we get to share it all together. And it’s the best part. It’s the best part of the culture. I love it. We’re really blessed to be here.”