Reed Sheppard is about to play his first NCAA Tournament game. How’s he feeling about it?
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NCAA Tournament preview: Kentucky vs. Oakland
Click below to read more coverage from the Lexington Herald-Leader and Kentucky.com ahead of Kentucky’s NCAA Tournament opener against Oakland University in Pittsburgh on Thursday night.
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The doors to Kentucky’s locker room opened Wednesday afternoon, and in came the flood of reporters and TV cameras eager to talk to the Wildcats on the eve of their first game in the NCAA Tournament.
Near one end of the room sat Reed Sheppard, the Kentucky native, the son of two former UK basketball stars, and the biggest fan favorite to come through Lexington in decades.
Seated next to Sheppard, casually chatting with him as those cameras started flooding in, was Brennan Canada, another Kentucky native and a Wildcats walk-on in his fifth and final season with the program. Like Sheppard, he grew up a UK basketball fan and knows what this time of year means to those in the commonwealth. He also knows what Sheppard means to those UK basketball fans. And, unlike most of the players around him, this wasn’t Canada’s first time in a Kentucky basketball open locker room.
He surveyed the scene, sat up from his locker, and he got the heck out of there. As he walked away from the impending scrum, Canada flashed the grin of someone who knew he was getting while the getting was still good. A few seconds later, he would’ve been trapped. Smart guy.
And then the cameras and questions descended upon Sheppard, who was a little more than 24 hours away from playing in his first NCAA Tournament game in what is increasingly looking like it might be his only season as a UK basketball player.
From a Kentucky high school folk hero who wasn’t quite sure how much he would play on this season’s team to a key contributor right off the bat who quickly blossomed into a bonafide star and is now projected as a top five pick in the 2024 NBA draft — maybe even the No. 1 pick — the past several months have been quite the journey for Sheppard.
It’s all led here.
“This is what you work for,” Sheppard said. “You work for March. You work for March Madness. It’s win or go home. Everything you do in practice, everything preseason — it all comes down to this. Now it’s time to lock in and stick together as a team.”
Kentucky’s path starts Thursday night against 14-seeded Oakland, and it’ll be the first NCAA Tournament action for pretty much everybody on the team.
“I’m super excited,” Sheppard said. “This is something you dream of growing up as a little kid. And finally being able to be here with Kentucky — it’s really, really cool. And being able to do it with such a great group of guys that we have around us and that are on this team, it’s going to be really, really fun.”
Going into Thursday’s game, Sheppard was averaging 12.8 points, 4.3 rebounds, 4.5 assists and 2.5 steals per game while shooting an eye-popping 52.5% from 3-point range. He’s done it all under the brightest spotlight imaginable. And he hasn’t wavered.
John Calipari said he pulled Sheppard aside Monday to talk to him about the past few months.
“I told him how proud I was of him,” Calipari said on his weekly radio show. “That I was blown away by how he has responded to all this stuff. How much better he has gotten. But I said, in my mind, it’s two things. His faith. And his family. His family has kept all the junk and clutter away from him. His faith has steadied him. And he’s so respected by the players on the team. And there’s no jealousy of him, or anything like that.
“He’s just a good — he’s a terrific player. And there are times, I’m like, ‘Why are you not shooting more?’ But he’s trying to get everybody involved and doing his thing. And by doing it, he’s still the best freshman in the country! Think about that. Just being unselfish. Being a servant leader, which is what he is.”
NCAA Tournament pressure?
Earlier this week, the USBWA named Sheppard as its National Freshman of the Year.
His roommate for UK road games — and someone who has become a close friend over the course of this season — is graduate transfer Tre Mitchell, who sat a couple of lockers over from Sheppard on Wednesday and talked about what he’d observed since getting to Lexington last summer.
“I think he’s done an amazing job,” Mitchell said. “... I see some of the interactions that fans have with him, and I feel like he’s a very humble person. He doesn’t take this experience for granted. When we’re walking to something, and somebody wants a picture or an autograph, he stops and he takes the time. He’s not a dude with a big head or anything. I think that just kind of helps him on the court, too. It keeps him level. And he’s ready to perform when the time comes.”
This is Mitchell’s fourth college basketball team, spending two years at UMass and one each at Texas and West Virginia before transferring to Kentucky for his final season. He’s been the star player on his team and he’s played with other talented players.
Sheppard-mania is something else.
“I don’t think I’ve seen anything like it, from a fan base on an individual player,” he said. “But when you take a step back and look at it, it makes sense. Both parents. Him growing up in Kentucky, and then coming to Kentucky — it’s almost like a weird Cinderella story, when you look at it. And what his father has done — hopefully we can top that.”
His father, Jeff Sheppard, was the Most Outstanding Player of the 1998 Final Four, where Kentucky won the national championship. The elder Sheppard also played for the 1996 title team.
These Wildcats won’t be able to top that, but they sure hope to match it.
Reed Sheppard will obviously be a big part of any prolonged run this Kentucky team makes. He knows what UK basketball means as much as anyone who was in that locker room Wednesday afternoon, and he knows what such a run would mean to the fans who have gone nine years without a Final Four and 12 years without a national title.
Calipari obviously knows what it means, too. Just as he knows how long it’s been since one of his teams hung a banner in Rupp Arena. For different reasons, it’s fair to think those two might feel more on their shoulders.
“You talk about the pressure of this tournament. It’s on everybody. ‘You got more than anybody else, and Reed has more than’ — no, it’s on everybody,” Calipari said Wednesday. “And how you deal with it is how have you done throughout the year when you’re down? Have you ever been down 36 minutes and came back and won the last four? Have you been up, they make a run and you gotta make another run? All that stuff adds up to the experience a young team like ours needed.”
Kentucky’s roller-coaster season has reached the point where one more stumble or step backward means everyone goes home, never to play together on the same team again. Obviously, nobody wants that.
Sheppard said he might have some butterflies upon checking into his first March Madness game — just like he felt some nervousness the first time he played in a real game as a Kentucky Wildcat in Rupp — but the 19-year-old stressed that there was no added pressure accompanying this NCAA Tournament.
He said he and his father have talked “a little bit” about playing on this stage.
“And he’s said, ‘Just enjoy it. Live in the moment. Don’t take anything for granted. Enjoy it all.’ That’s his thing,” the younger Sheppard said. “‘Just go out and do what you do. Keep doing what you’ve been doing. … And just have fun with it.’”
His teammates — a roster with eight freshmen, one sophomore who didn’t play in last year’s postseason and another who played very little — all surely dreamed of getting to this point in their lives, playing in an NCAA Tournament for a team that has a real shot to win it.
And as much as Sheppard has managed to keep himself on the same level as his teammates all season long, he recognizes there is a bit of a difference here. Everyone has March Madness dreams.
“But I also dreamed of playing in March Madness for Kentucky. And being able to do that — I’m really excited,” he said.
This UK basketball team has captured the imagination of its fan base like few others in recent years. These Wildcats are beloved, and Sheppard is undoubtedly a big reason why. Probably the biggest. But that locker room Wednesday afternoon was filled with other personalities — Rob Dillingham, Zvonimir Ivisic, Aaron Bradshaw and more — who have made this season a memorable one, whatever happens next.
Sheppard has been following this program his entire life. He acknowledged that this is a special group. And, better than anyone, he knows how much the fans have invested in the outcome of what comes next.
“I think we play a fun way of basketball. And everyone in this room is a really good guy. And we’re all really close on and off the court. Everyone interacts with the fans well. And we love being able to do that. We love being able to talk to the fans and hang out with them and everything that we do. So, it’s really fun. It’s been a really fun year. And it’s not over yet.”
This story was originally published March 20, 2024 at 6:30 PM.
