‘The upside is massive.’ Kentucky basketball uses road trips as bonding opportunities.
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With the holiday season in full swing, plenty of people can sympathize with long hours of travel that come alongside loved ones.
These endeavors, ideally, bring us closer together through shared experiences, despite the trials and tribulations that may occur when traversing the country.
This concept is no different for Mark Pope’s first Kentucky basketball team, which features a new coaching staff alongside 12 scholarship players, none of whom had ever coached or played for UK before this season.
The early-season results from this group have been impressive. Kentucky has raced out to a 10-1 start, and the Wildcats are ranked No. 4 in the nation on the strength of showcase wins over Duke and Gonzaga.
Pope’s distinct offensive approach — spearheaded by assistant coach Cody Fueger with a premium placed on cutting, screening and general off-ball movement — has also provided positive early returns. The Wildcats are averaging 91.3 points per game and rank highly in a number of nationwide offensive metrics.
Team cohesiveness is paramount to this style of play. Naturally, fostering a strong bond between this group of Cats has been a big focus for Pope and his staff.
Recent months have been filled with moments, big and small, where Kentucky has become closer as a team, and plenty of them have taken place on the road together.
This process began in August, when UK completed a multi-day service project rebuilding homes in Eastern Kentucky. This concept — of traveling and participating in activities — has continued through the marquee road trips that have highlighted Kentucky’s schedule so far.
By the end of this week, Pope’s team will have visited Atlanta, Seattle and New York City together within the first seven weeks of the season.
“We love the education part of this experience. We’re always working hard to give our guys opportunities to put more capital in the bank in terms of loving each other and knowing each other,” Pope said on his weekly radio show Monday night. “You get to do that through new experiences.”
It also helps that Pope has placed a premium on making sure his players take advantage of the opportunities to sightsee when they’re away from the commonwealth.
Before UK’s Champions Classic win over Duke last month in Atlanta, the Wildcats spent game-day morning visiting the Martin Luther King Jr. National Historical Park.
This month before a gutsy, shorthanded win in overtime over Gonzaga in Seattle, Kentucky’s team excursions included visits to the Space Needle observation tower and Pike Place Market.
With UK hitting the road Thursday ahead of Saturday’s game against Ohio State at New York City’s famed Madison Square Garden, what does Pope and the program have planned?
“We have a couple things that are going to be really incredible experiences for our guys,” Pope said Wednesday, noting that weeks were spent planning out the Cats’ activities in NYC. “I’m not going to tell you any of them, because I know BBN and they’ll show up at everything and that defeats the purpose.”
Before Pope declined to go into detail about what the UK team will be doing in New York City, he eloquently explained that his position on using team trips as bonding opportunities has changed over the years.
Pope even acknowledged during the response that he felt “pressure and tension” in the act of explaining just how much he now values travel opportunities with his players.
“Throughout my whole basketball career as a player and then the first half of my coaching career, I was about like, ‘How long can you sustain a level 10 intensity and focus?’” Pope began, illustrating how he would spend 24 hours a day in game mode.
Then came a change.
While he was the head coach at BYU, Pope brought in “The Squad.”
This group consisted of four faculty members who specialized in different areas of psychology. The professors joined the basketball support staff on a volunteer basis, and in the process changed the way Pope viewed team excursions.
“Through investigations and studies and really criticism from them, it just changed the whole way that I actually approached this,” Pope said. “Instead of trying to live in that space of being absolutely unfettered, laser-focused every second, emotionally and mentally, on the game and being intense and getting myself and our team ready to go, we kind of flipped to a totally different philosophy.”
How’s that change going?
“It’s actually been brilliant,” Pope declared. “It fits us better now.”
“The fact that we’re going on a trip to go play a game at Madison Square Garden and we’re going to do anything that’s not only grit your teeth, full sweat, basketball. It was really foreign to me three or four years ago,” Pope added. “But our guys respond to it great now. … The upside is massive.”
Obviously, the results have played out in Kentucky’s favor thus far this season, with UK winning both of its “big city” games over the Blue Devils and Bulldogs.
“It just builds this collective cohesiveness that I actually think wins in a brilliantly unique way,” Pope said.
Mark Pope set to return to New York City with UK basketball
Several of Kentucky road trips this season have been personal for Pope.
Seattle was where Pope blossomed into a high school basketball star, with plenty of friends and family members attending that game against Gonzaga on Dec. 7.
Of course, New York City is a locale perhaps even more special to Pope. He spent his childhood in Westchester County, located just North of New York City, and was on the New York Knicks roster for the 2002-03 NBA season. Pope went on to attend medical school at Columbia University in the Big Apple for three years before turning his focus to college coaching.
New York City is also where Pope’s wife, Lee Anne, worked as a personal assistant to late-night talk show host David Letterman.
“I’ve loved that city since I was a young child,” Pope said on his radio show this week.
Whichever end of the country it may be, Pope values the bonding moments that can come from the Cats’ travel schedule.
“Just these opportunities for our guys to be more invested in each other,” Pope said on his radio program. “Every time we take a trip, we carve out a good 90 minutes or two hours where we can go, put ourselves in a different environment where we can know each other better and get to see the world a little bit.”
“It’s been really special for us,” Pope added. “There’s no better place in the world to do that than New York City.”
This story was originally published December 18, 2024 at 1:08 PM.
