Will Mark Pope add a GM to UK basketball staff? Here’s a look at the Cats’ current setup.
During his first days as Kentucky’s new men’s basketball coach, Mark Pope joked that things were so quiet around the team office that UK athletics director Mitch Barnhart and a couple of fellow administrators would pop in simply so he could see some other human beings.
“But it’ll get full of life and joy soon,” Pope said at the time.
Two months later, that UK basketball office is a bustling place.
Pope has added nearly a dozen staffers since taking over for John Calipari in April, and it sounds likely that there could be another spot or two to fill before the 2024-25 season begins.
He said during his first formal press conference of the summer Tuesday that he’s taking his time with any future additions.
“So we went really fast — well, relatively fast. You know, I’m pretty slow and methodical and meticulous about it, especially adding personnel into the staff,” Pope said. “Fitting the pieces together is so important to me. And so that’s actually work. You just readjust your thinking every time you add a new piece.”
His comments came eight days after the first UK basketball practice of the summer, which will feature eight weeks of on-court time between players and coaches. The Cats wrapped up their sixth practice of June earlier in the day, and the time so far has given Pope a look at what his staff — featuring some new faces he’s never worked with before — actually looks like on the court.
“And so now we’re at the point with potentially a last staff spot or two — about not re-evaluating personnel, but re-evaluating positions and features of what a job would look like. And that actually is taking longer,” Pope said. “And I’m really glad that we’ve crossed over the threshold of where I get to see the staff on the court now, interacting with the players, in terms of teaching and instructing and pushing and communicating. I’m getting to see the staff in a new light in the last week and a couple days.
“And so as we take in all that information, all of that is kind of going to filter into the last spot or two about how we re-evaluate what that job’s even going to look like.”
At Pope’s introductory press conference in Rupp Arena back in April, the possibility of a “general manager” to oversee his UK staff was raised. He didn’t definitively say what he planned to do with such a role, though Pope did acknowledge the sweeping changes across the sport in recent years, specifically mentioning the transfer portal and NIL demands as new challenges for head coaches to navigate.
Adding the role of general manager to college basketball coaching staffs has become en vogue as a result of those changes.
Duke made the biggest splash in that realm, hiring Rachel Baker to be the program’s GM in the summer of 2022, one of the first major moves of the Jon Scheyer era following the retirement of Hall of Fame head coach Mike Krzyzewski earlier that year.
Before joining the Duke staff, Baker was a longtime Nike basketball official with experience in the NBA league office. She was well known in grassroots circles for her work with Nike’s Elite Youth Basketball League, the top recruiting circuit in the country and a key training ground for highly ranked prospects before they get to college.
“The state of college basketball is growing and changing at an exponential rate,” Scheyer said in the official announcement of Baker’s hiring two years ago. “Rachel is a one-of-a-kind talent with unique experience that will provide our players and their families with an unparalleled resource and partner as we navigate new frontiers of college basketball together. Through her work in the NBA and at Nike, she brings nearly a decade of expertise in the business of basketball to our staff, as well as her gifts in relationship and community building, leadership development, and experiential marketing. We can’t wait to see all she brings to our program in this newly created position.”
The possibility of hiring a general manager during John Calipari’s time at Kentucky was often discussed, but such a move never happened. Calipari has given longtime associate Chris Woolard the title of “general manager” at Arkansas. Woolard had the title of associate athletics director for basketball operations while he was at UK, where he spent the past 13 seasons.
Several other major college basketball programs — Baylor, Michigan, Texas and Villanova, to name a few — also have staff members with general manager titles.
Pope didn’t specifically mention the possibility of a UK basketball GM on Tuesday — and he wasn’t directly asked about the role in those exact terms — but it sounded clear enough that he’s not quite done adding to his first staff in Lexington.
And, whether or not there’s an official GM of the Wildcats, he might be thinking outside the box with any future hires.
“The landscape of college basketball has changed so dramatically that there’s this real push about, like, ‘Man, if I end up with exactly the same staff that I would have had three years ago, that hasn’t been reactionary to the massive change in college basketball, then I might miss something.’ And so we’re trying to figure all that out,” he said. “We already have a couple positions that are a little bit unique and different, and we’re trying to fill out the last few spots.”
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Mark Pope’s coaching staff
Pope has already filled most of the spots on his first UK basketball staff.
The five assistant coaches for the 2024-25 season will be Alvin Brooks III, Mark Fox, Cody Fueger, Jason Hart and Mikhail McLean.
Brooks, who has the title of associate head coach, Fueger and Hart are the three assistants who will also be permitted for off-campus recruiting activities.
Brooks, a longtime Baylor assistant under Scott Drew, has earned the reputation as one of the country’s top recruiters, in addition to his work on the court. Fueger, who has been on Pope’s staff for all nine of his previous seasons as a head coach, is UK’s “offensive coordinator” and was integral in recruiting activities at BYU. And Hart, a former NBA point guard and Southern Cal assistant, has spent the past three years as the head coach of the G League Ignite program, which has sent several draft picks on to the league.
Fox, who has the title of associate coach, is a longtime Division I head coach with nearly two decades of experience running his own program. He was Georgia’s head coach from 2009 to 2018 and made five NCAA Tournament trips during his time there and his previous job (Nevada).
McLean, who played college basketball at Houston, worked on Kelvin Sampson’s basketball staff there before becoming a full assistant at Lamar University, where he spent the past three seasons. He is spending this summer as an assistant coach with the Bahamas National Team as it attempts to qualify for the 2024 Olympics.
Fox and McLean will not travel for off-campus recruiting activities, though they will engage in on-court instruction and can meet with recruits while they’re in town for campus visits.
Other UK basketball staff members
In addition to those five assistant coaches, Pope has hired Nick Robinson to be UK’s director of basketball operations. Robinson, a former player at Stanford, has nearly 20 years of experience as a college coach, including as head coach at Southern Utah from 2012 to 2016. He spent the past five seasons as an assistant under Pope and alongside Fueger at BYU.
Along with Fueger and Robinson, the new UK basketball coach has brought two of his former graduate assistants from Provo to Lexington for the 2024-25 season.
Matthew Santoro will have the title of assistant video coordinator with the Wildcats, and he is expected to play a large role in video work for scouting and evaluation purposes. Santoro was a grad assistant at BYU last season and was a student manager at Pitt while he was in college.
Leander Ridgeway will be a grad assistant for the Wildcats after serving in the same role on Pope’s staff at BYU last season. Ridgeway is from Lexington — a Henry Clay High School graduate — and is a former player at Asbury University, where he graduated in 2021.
Another name of interest from Pope’s staff at BYU has been Keegan Brown, who had the title of director of video and analytics strategy with the Cougars and is no longer listed on the staff directory for new head coach Kevin Young.
Brown, who was with Pope for all five seasons at BYU, was initially expected to follow the head coach to Kentucky. He held a Q&A session on the Discord channel of anonymous college basketball insider Trilly Donovan on Monday night and said he had received interest from both college programs and NBA teams this offseason, adding that a move to UK is still “still very much an option at this point” and acknowledging that his ultimate goal is to work in an NBA front office.
The other officially named member of Pope’s first UK basketball staff is Randy Towner, who will be the head strength coach for the Wildcats this season. He replaces Brady Welsh, who spent the final two seasons of John Calipari’s tenure at Kentucky in that role and has since joined NBA-bound Reed Sheppard as a personal strength and conditioning coach for the former Wildcats star.
Towner spent the past two seasons with the Milwaukee Bucks and has experience working for several men’s and women’s college basketball teams. He was also on Pope’s staff for two seasons at Utah Valley.
