Jaland Lowe is here to lead this UK basketball team, whether you like it or not
AI-generated summary reviewed by our newsroom.
- Kentucky coach Mark Pope recruited Jaland Lowe from transfer portal as starting point.
- Pope sought leadership; Lowe asserted himself immediately as team floor general.
- Lowe’s Texas roots and mentorships shaped his competitive, accountable leadership.
When the transfer portal opened to start Mark Pope’s first full offseason as the head coach at Kentucky, priority No. 1 was finding a new point guard.
As Jaland Lowe’s sophomore season in college basketball drew to a close, he knew he needed a change of scenery.
So when Lowe’s name hit the portal, Pope didn’t hesitate.
UK’s coach didn’t know much about Lowe the person, but he knew all about Lowe as a player. While his sophomore season as Pittsburgh’s starting point guard had been a bit uneven, anyone who looked past some of the stats, dug deeper into the numbers and simply watched what Lowe could do on the court had to see the sky-high potential.
Lowe didn’t know much about Pope the coach, but he knew all about Kentucky. The son of a Texas grassroots basketball fixture, Lowe grew up around the game. As a kid, he had a list of major college programs taped above his bed signifying the schools he wanted scholarship offers from. UK was on that list, alongside Duke, Kansas and a few others.
None offered him a scholarship.
So when Pope saw Lowe’s name in the portal, he was excited. And when the UK coach reached out to Lowe’s dad, that excitement spread.
Lowe had just arrived in Minnesota — his home base for NBA draft workouts — and Pope made contact with his father, Marland Lowe, immediately. Pope said he wanted to meet with them the next day. He got on a plane for Minnesota, and when the point guard walked into a room in his hotel the next morning, Kentucky’s coach was waiting for him.
“He’s probably the most animated and joyful person and coach that I’ve ever met,” Lowe said. “It was really crazy to see, because I’ve never seen a coach act like that before. As soon as he saw me, he stood up, was super excited and he pumped his hand. He was like, ‘Yo, what’s up! Man, am I super excited to talk to you and get to know you.’
“And you could tell throughout the whole conversation — just in his tone and how excited he was to talk about Kentucky and his coaching staff and the players that he had — it’s the type of energy and joy that you don’t see a lot of people talk with.”
That first meeting consisted of Lowe, his father, Pope and UK associate head coach Alvin Brooks III.
Lowe was taken aback not just by Pope’s excitement level or his pitch for Kentucky basketball, but the way he talked — from firsthand experience — about what it meant to be a Wildcat.
Lowe had known Brooks — another fixture in the tight-knit Texas basketball community — for as long as he could remember, so there was some familiarity there. The more he listened to Pope, the more he started to picture himself at Kentucky.
Lowe said he heard from “everybody” during his brief time in the portal. How many other coaches made the trip to Minnesota to meet with him in person? “None,” he said.
The player and his father spent a couple of nights talking it over. “It was kind of like a no-brainer,” Lowe said. “It was pretty clear for both of us that Kentucky would be the best option.”
Lowe committed to UK, and it was understood from that moment that he would be the Wildcats’ starting point guard for the 2025-26 season.
Pope had the player he wanted.
But he didn’t just want a solid player at the position. He wanted a leader. And trying to figure out something like that on the fly is never easy. In that regard, Pope acknowledges that he didn’t know exactly what to expect.
“When I went to visit him in person for the first time, I was impressed by his directness,” Pope said. “And I was impressed by his confidence, at least an air of confidence. So there was the beginnings of that. But I was really pleased when he got here, and I started to kind of feel that, because it’s important to have that on a team.”
Jaland Lowe’s basketball beginnings
It was clear from talking to his new teammates over the summer that Lowe quickly cemented himself as the leader of this UK basketball team.
That narrative was already established when Pope said this during an appearance on the CBS Sports “Eye on College Basketball” podcast: “He has the beautiful skill of not being overly concerned with whether people like him in any given moment.”
In an interview with the Herald-Leader this preseason, Lowe listened intently when that quote was read back to him. He said he had never heard it before. He also said Pope was spot on.
“I feel like that’s a good way to describe me,” Lowe said. “just as a basketball player from where I grew up — and the leaders I’ve seen around me growing up — you have to just not be able to care sometimes about what other people think or say about you.
“Because, as a leader, you have to carve your own way. And you have to do the things that work for you and work for your team. So if other people don’t see it that way, that’s cool. I know what I’m here for. I know I’m trying to win and make the people around me better.”
The origin of that attitude is easy to pinpoint.
Lowe called his father — the longtime leader of one of the top grassroots basketball programs in the country — the “most influential” person in his life, but his dad’s connections led to other influences, too. Lowe’s godfather is John Lucas, the former No. 1 NBA draft pick and onetime head coach of three different teams in the league.
Lucas is also basically the godfather of Texas hoops. He’s a national figure on the grassroots scene — countless NBA stars have gone through his camps — and a constant presence in all levels of basketball inside the Lone Star State.
As a boy, Lowe grew up in Lucas’ gym. He studied Lucas closely. He also recalled watching guys like De’Aaron Fox, Jarrett Allen and Carsen Edwards from a young age. He saw their games, of course. But he also learned to look deeper.
“You see those guys growing up and you see how they carry themselves. And you want to be like them,” Lowe said. “You hear the words that they say, the work that they put in on the court and off the court — it just shows you how to become a leader and the way that you want to carry yourself.”
Over the years, Lowe has learned how to forge his own way as a leader. Pope said it manifested in different ways during his first few weeks on UK’s campus. The coach’s first eyebrow-raising experience came when his team was scrimmaging the La Familia TBT squad — a group of former UK players that included Willie Cauley-Stein, Doron Lamb and the Harrison twins — and the 6-foot-1 point guard, still just 20 years old at the time, refused to back down.
“Here we are playing with former players — that are great players — and J-Lowe was talking smack,” Pope said. “And not just that, but his attitude, his demeanor, was like, ‘I don’t care. I’m gonna go win.’ Like, ‘We’re gonna win.’ And I had seen it in practice early on in the summer.
“He’s not afraid to hold a teammate accountable, even if the teammate gets mad at him and goes to the locker room like, ‘Man, that guy’s a jerk.’ He’s not afraid of that. I think that the seeds of that are inside of him, and we have to help him grow that. It’s really important. It’s really, really important.”
Growing into a UK basketball leader
The way Lowe goes about leading necessitates a balancing act, on and off the court.
“And you’re never going to get it exactly right,” Pope said. “But if you’re too far on either side, it’s a miss.”
A leader has to hold his fellow players accountable, the UK coach continued, but he also has to know when to drop the tough-guy persona and turn into a “loving” teammate himself.
“And to be a championship teammate, you have to hold them accountable to the point where you’re not afraid of them getting mad, and then know that you can go save it after,” Pope said. “And then be willing to be humble about it — and be loving enough about it — to actually go fix it after.
“It’s kind of like telling the truth — the hard truth, the whole truth, the brutal truth — and then make sure you put your arm around your teammate after. And that process happens not once. It happens every day, multiple times, if we do it right.”
Lowe said his first couple of weeks at Kentucky were spent having conversations about how to lead a new group of guys that he’d never played with before.
As the weeks went on, he spent a lot of time off the court with Otega Oweh, the team’s star player. He grew close to fellow transfer Denzel Aberdeen, a likely starter in the backcourt. Lowe speaks with pride about freshman guard Jasper Johnson’s potential and being there to guide him through his first season of college. He speaks with humility about watching and listening to Collin Chandler — a sophomore, but a UK returnee — as he learned the ropes of Pope’s system.
Other players from across the positional spectrum have complimented his approach so far.
“What people don’t want to hear, they gotta hear at times,” Aberdeen said. “And he also makes sure that he keeps himself in check, too. He’s not just chirping on one guy. It’s everybody. He’s just letting us know what we have to do to get better, which is great. He pushes us to get better.”
Oweh said that even extends to the coaching staff.
“He’s very vocal. What he’s thinking, he’s just gonna say it,” he said. “Even in film, if something doesn’t make sense or it’s just not clicking — or if he thinks the coach made a mistake or something — he’s gonna hold everybody to it. Like, ‘Oh, that’s not right. No, that’s not what you told us before.’ He’s gonna hold everyone to it.”
Oweh, typically mild-mannered in interview settings, seemed on the verge of cracking up as he recalled scenes of Lowe talking back to coaches. Is it good to have someone like that on the team?
“I think it’s good. I don’t know what the coaches think. They’ve probably never seen something like that,” he said with a smile. “But I like it.”
Pope likes it, too. But he wants it to be balanced. And that’s going to take time.
Just like a player is never a finished product — especially in college — a leader always has room to grow, particularly a 21-year-old tasked with being the coach on the floor for a mostly new roster with realistic national title expectations.
Lowe obviously isn’t shy. His teammates take notice when he speaks. As the season goes on, some will be rubbed the wrong way by those words. He’ll have to remain aware of all of those dynamics while also playing to his potential on the court.
It won’t be easy, but it will be necessary for this team to reach its ceiling. And Pope thinks he’s found the right player for the job.
“He needs reps doing this, and he needs coaching doing this, but I think he’s got the capacity to be great at it, because there’s that seed of him,” he said. “Especially in today’s world, there are so many people that are willing to be insanely critical in a tweet or a post hidden behind no name. But when they’re face to face, they only tell you what you want to hear. Right? I think that’s probably the norm now.
“And so when you find somebody that’s willing to love you, but look you in the eye and be like, ‘That’s not OK, man. Step it up.’ And do it with some passion. I just don’t think that’s a common personality trait right now, and it’s really important.”
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