Why doesn't Mark Pope yell? "Burning white hot doesn't have a ton of staying power."

It doesn’t take long for you to notice Mark Pope‘s coaching approach is different than most. Rather than screaming at the top of his lungs with expletives making up every other word, he talks to his players and staff in a normal speaking voice if not a whisper. When he walks into the locker room at halftime, he asks everyone else how they’re processing the game first before sharing his insights and potential fixes — again, level-headed calculated rather than emotional and loud.

Like with most things, there is a method to his madness there. It’s not that Kentucky‘s head coach refuses to yell — he’ll admit there is a time and place for it. He just knows it’s not nearly as effective when trying to get through to his players.

If he ever needs to rip ’em, as one fan asked during his call-in radio show this week, he wants it to mean something.

“We try to save our voice as much as we can,” Pope said. “One of the things about burning white hot is it doesn’t have a ton of staying power, but it’s necessary and it’s important, so we try and choose those moments really wisely. The most important part of it is, what is the intention?”

If you’re making a specific point to a player about something they’re doing well or poorly, maybe to help get them out of a rut or bring them back down to earth, that’s one thing. To aimlessly shout out of anger is another.

“If the intention is for me to outlet all of my frustration and anger, then that’s going to be a miss and a fail every single time,” he said. “If it’s really intentional to help my guys get out of their own heads, to get out of their own worries, and bring them back to the present moment, that’s when it’s super functional. That’s hard, because I’m emotional and all of us are emotional. In this business, everybody is emotional, right? So it’s a matter of being super intentional, rather being emotionally reactive.

“It’s incredibly effective to burn white hot, to rip into your guys, to put guys on notice in a moment when it’s super intentional and it’s received different, actually. It’s super important.”

Pope compared it to a hard reset, using the old trick of dipping a crying baby’s hand in cold water to calm down as an example. Sometimes a good wake-up call can help a player snap out of it after getting stuck in their head for too long.

“It’s kind of like, if you have a infant that’s crying, that is super emotional, and they’re kind of having an emotional outburst. At some point it just cycles, and they don’t know why. One of the things that could be helpful sometimes is just taking their hand and putting it in a really cold glass of water,” he said. “It’s interesting, because what it does is it kind of gets them out of this cycle of being withdrawn in their own head, in their own emotions, and it brings them back present.

“They actually start to feel something in the moment and notice something in the moment. The psychology behind that is pretty sound in the sense of when you choose to burn white hot.”

Players respond to communication differently, some taking tough love well and others handling it poorly. Pope keeps that in mind and tries to do whatever works best for each individual case, pushing to get the most out of everyone on the team.

He was brought up in basketball with some guys who liked to burn white hot — hello, Rick Pitino. He’s found this approach to be more effective, though.

“There are also times when guys are feeling some pain, like when a guy is really struggling or a guy is really uncertain, or you don’t want to bail him out in the moment all the time. Sometimes it’s effective to just let them sit in that space to see what answers they can find first for themselves before you artificially start getting the answer,” Pope said. “There are times when all of this is really important. We just do it different, we don’t burn white hot all the time. It used to be that you burn white hot all the time and it was exposure therapy, so you just became numb to it. It didn’t matter how big the moment, how much pressure, you were just like, ‘I have no feeling whatsoever, I’m just gonna go crush it.’

“That’s the way I was raised, but we’re doing it a little different now here.”