Braydon Hawthorne will return to Kentucky next season. He’s already learned a lot
AI-generated summary reviewed by our newsroom.
- Braydon Hawthorne commits to return to Kentucky for the 2026–27 season.
- Redshirt year focused on strength, nutrition and system mastery.
- Coaches and teammates report clear progress and expanded role.
First things first.
In this transfer portal era of college basketball, nothing should be assumed.
Kentucky fans are savvy enough to know this, and that’s why there’s always a fair amount of skepticism surrounding stay-or-go speculation this time of year. When thinking about next season’s roster, it’s best to just wait until the player himself makes things clear before jumping to any conclusions.
Braydon Hawthorne couldn’t have made it any clearer. Asked if he expected to be back in Lexington next season, the UK freshman nodded his head emphatically.
“Yeah,” he said. “For sure.”
And by that point in the conversation, such a declaration probably wasn’t necessary.
Hawthorne spoke to the Herald-Leader for nearly 30 minutes on the eve of Kentucky’s regular-season finale late last week, and the entirety of his comments conveyed a young man who feels he’s learned a lot over the course of this season and can’t wait to put all of that progress on full display when the next one rolls around.
A late-blooming prospect who rose to top-50 status toward the tail end of the 2025 recruiting cycle — ending up at No. 33 nationally in the 247Sports rankings — Hawthorne has spent this season as a curiosity to UK fans.
Tales of his performances in practice have made the rounds since last summer. Regular attendees of those sessions have raved about his ability. Coaches and teammates smile, raise their eyebrows or shake their heads — sometimes all three at once — when asked about his potential.
But all the general public has seen of Hawthorne these past few months has come during Kentucky’s pregame warmups. The 6-foot-8 wing from Beckley, West Virginia, is out there on gamedays, putting up 3-point shots, showing off his footwork and mobility, offering a tantalizing glimpse of that talent to the few who have been in Rupp Arena to see it.
Meanwhile, some fans who have followed his journey have feared he might not return for the 2026-27 season, perhaps looking to capitalize on that potential by hitting the portal before ever playing a game for the Cats.
Those fears, the player made clear, are unfounded.
Hawthorne offered the reminder that this season, for him, has pretty much gone exactly as planned. Sure, there was a scenario in which he showed up in Lexington over the summer and performed at such a high level that coach Mark Pope would have no choice but to play him in actual games.
But with a roster so deep — when the season began, at least — and with so much that Hawthorne could work on, redshirting became the clear path fairly early in the process.
For a competitor like Hawthorne, how tough has it been to work his tail off behind the scenes and not get the payoff of performing on gamedays?
“I wouldn’t say it’s been difficult,” he said. “But there are times where you think about, ‘Man, I was a top-50 recruit last year, and I haven’t played in a year.’ But that’s when you just gotta be mentally strong and just keep your mind straight on what the goal is.
“And just keep working and get better.”
That’s been exactly what these nine months have been about.
Pope has talked about this path in clear terms several times over the course of this season. Allowing Hawthorne to come along at his own speed without the pressures of full-on gameday preparation and worries over playing time has kept the focus on growing his own skill set.
In 2026, it’s something of a unique experiment. Not often these days does a player with legitimate NBA upside willingly take on a redshirt role. But Hawthorne is a unique prospect, and — even with 20/20 hindsight — he made it clear the chosen path has been the correct one.
And after nearly a year spent in Pope’s system amid the UK basketball culture, Hawthorne feels much better equipped to make a splash next season than he would have as a true freshman.
“I feel like it’s gonna be great,” he said. “Because I feel like I’ll be a step ahead of everybody next year, knowing the system and everything else. As soon as we get back on campus, I feel like that puts me in a great spot — just knowing everything already.”
Braydon Hawthorne, behind the scenes
Hawthorne, who turned 20 years old last month, was originally committed to home-state West Virginia before a coaching change there led him to reopen his recruitment last spring.
Pope had been in attendance for one of his high school games — playing against current UK teammate Jasper Johnson — and reached out as soon as Hawthorne became available.
Even at the time of his commitment, the idea of a redshirt was brought up as a possibility. And while he impressed over the summer and fall, that was chosen as the most logical course.
One key factor was Hawthorne’s frame. Again, he’s listed at 6-8 and looks every bit of it, but the first thing that jumped out to anyone who saw him last offseason was surely his thin build. Pope compared him to UK great Tayshaun Prince — skinny even in his NBA days — and said gaining strength and weight would be a key factor in getting Hawthorne ready for the rough-and-tumble SEC.
So Hawthorne got to work. He said his low point in the summer was 173 pounds. He’s now up to 192 pounds. And he can feel the difference on the court.
“I feel like physicality has been really big for me here recently,” Hawthorne said. “I feel like I’ve just gotten so much better as a player since I’ve been here.”
From the beginning, Hawthorne has worked with UK’s strength and conditioning team, as well as a nutritionist, to get his body in a better place to withstand the physicality of high-major college basketball. He’s lifting weights basically every day. He’s followed a strict diet plan that includes making sure he gets three meals a day, with several snacks in between, eating at consistent times and especially immediately after workouts and practices. His go-to meal: a combo of steak, broccoli, potatoes and rice.
The gains have been apparent on the practice court.
“I feel like I can initiate contact way better than I could when I got here,” he said. “And I can take contact, as well. I can feel the difference in my body, as well. People are telling me that I look like I’m filling out a little bit more. At first, I couldn’t tell, but now I’m starting to realize it.”
Even at the beginning, teammates and other observers marveled at the skinny kid who never shied away from contact, refusing to back down from the bigger bodies on UK’s roster. The team’s resident tough guy, Mouhamed Dioubate, sent Hawthorne to the emergency room with an inadvertent elbow to the face in the preseason, a shot that necessitated stitches in the young player’s mouth. He was laughing about it at the team’s media day event in October.
The added weight and strength has made him even more aggressive, he said. It hasn’t done anything to hurt his confidence either. Asked who the toughest teammate to defend this season has been, Hawthorne thought for a moment. “Nobody,” he said with a grin.
Asked who the toughest defensive matchup has been, he had to concede that Otega Oweh is a difficult guy to get around.
“He challenges me,” Hawthorne said, the grin re-emerging. “But I tell him every day, he still can’t stop me.”
Oweh, he said, has taken a lot of extra time out of his schedule to play one-on-one with the freshman. The senior guard and preseason SEC player of the year works with Hawthorne on off days and after practices. It’s made things easier for the college newcomer, especially learning to create space against one of the nation’s toughest perimeter defenders and finding new ways to get off quality shots under pressure.
Hawthorne said UK’s coaches throw everybody on the roster at him in practice.
“I feel like it’s benefitted a lot,” he said. “Like having the ball in your hands and then seeing different looks, like being doubled, coming off the screen, getting blitzed, and just the different things, schemes they throw at you. It’s been pretty good.”
His role with UK basketball
For Hawthorne, the toughest adjustment came when he first arrived on campus last June.
The pace of play at the college level was a challenge. As was the competition.
“In high school, you could get away with things that you can’t get away with here,” he said. “Here, every possession matters. High school, you could take off a play and get away with it. But now you can’t.”
He started the season among the regular rotation players but — with the redshirt option solidifying as the most likely scenario — was switched relatively early to the scout team.
There, he’s played the role of several big-name opponents. He was Caleb Wilson — projected as a top-five NBA draft pick — in UK’s prep for the North Carolina game in early December. The Cats lost that game, but they did a good job of limiting Wilson, and veteran teammates praised Hawthorne’s portrayal of the UNC star.
“I didn’t like playing him,” he said. “Because he’s straight downhill, and they just wanted me to get downhill. I mean, I can get downhill, but he wasn’t my favorite one to play.”
Tennessee’s Nate Ament, a 6-10 forward who likes to play on the perimeter and averages around four 3-point attempts per game, was a more fun assignment. Hawthorne also enjoyed playing the role of 6-5 guard Rylan Griffen — an even more prolific long-range shooter — before last week’s Texas A&M game.
“There’s been a couple of good ones where I’ve been able to just get loose and play,” he said.
Based on the state of UK’s roster at different times this season, Hawthorne has bounced back and forth between a scout-team role and being a regular rotation player in practice.
He said he purposefully tried to stay away from the fan speculation over whether he’d actually play in games, though he did acknowledge that there was legitimate talk regarding burning his redshirt as the season wore on, especially after Kam Williams joined Jaland Lowe and Jayden Quaintance on the sidelines due to injury.
Hawthorne had his own injury concerns around that time — a sprained ankle that kept him out for several days, as well as a calf strain — but said playing would still have been a possibility. He decided to stay the course instead.
“I just didn’t feel like that was the right thing for me to do this late in the season,” he said. “I feel like it was just too late. You never know how (it affects things). You come in, you could be really good or you could throw everything off in a way. But I just felt like it was kind of late — just stick to the original plan.”
The hope is that the original plan will pay dividends for both UK and Hawthorne down the road.
A key to Kentucky’s next roster
What has Hawthorne learned from his changing role behind the scenes this season?
“Being on the second or third rotation, you get to get in there with the guys and feel like you’re a part of something,” he said. “And then with the scout team, it’s the mindset of just going out there and killing everybody, attacking everybody. I like it, 100%, because I can be ultra aggressive and just have my teammates mad, you know, because I’m going after them.”
He laughed out loud at that statement. It wasn’t an empty boast.
“He’s still killing us in practice, every time,” senior guard Denzel Aberdeen told the Herald-Leader last week. “He’s improving, man. He’s getting stronger, getting bigger. His shot’s more efficient. You’re gonna see a lot of him, probably, next year. He’s gonna be amazing.”
That’s the plan.
At 6-8, Hawthorne looks the part of a silky smooth 3-pointer shooter capable of playing multiple positions on the perimeter. Even with the weight gain, he’s still skinny, but teammates have talked up his toughness, and his instincts and mobility should allow him to work into spaces all over the floor. He expects to play the 3 in Pope’s system, but he won’t be limited positionally.
“I feel like really anywhere from like 2 through 4,” he said. “Because 2 and 3 are like the same thing. I feel like I can play a little bit of 4. I feel like my versatility — kind of like what Kam brings to the table; his shooting, defense, and his size, his length, as well as being able to dribble the ball, bring it up. Make reads, make plays for teammates and stuff like that.
“I feel like my game fits well.”
That’s why he’s here.
Hawthorne grew up as a fan of Kentucky, but he said that didn’t have much to do with his decision to join the program last year. It was simply a bonus to what he saw as a great opportunity to play under Pope and his perimeter-oriented approach.
The UK coach has had one-on-one meetings with Hawthorne throughout the season. “Real fun guy. Real fun coach,” Hawthorne said, noting that Pope has hammered home the importance of staying mentally locked in amid this redshirt year.
And that’s how he’s treated this season. He hasn’t actually played in games, but he’s traveled with his teammates to all of their away contests. He’s closely studied how UK’s opponents have played, both as a scout team member and from the bench on gamedays.
This experience has allowed him to get acclimated to high-major college basketball, the Kentucky experience and Pope’s own approach, all while getting better at his own speed and not having to worry about performing during games.
To be clear, he can’t wait until that opportunity comes.
Hawthorne has also spent the past nine months building chemistry, on and off the court, with a bunch of teammates he hopes will return alongside him next season. While Oweh, Aberdeen and Quaintance (a potential NBA lottery pick) will be gone, everyone else has remaining eligibility, and the expectation is that Pope will get several players back for next season.
Hawthorne, whom teammates have described as the “funniest” player on the team and a bright light amid this season’s struggles, has been studying his fellow Cats closely, looking forward to joining them on the court once the real games begin again next November.
Whomever he plays alongside next season, Hawthorne will be approaching it with a confidence that wouldn’t have been possible without what he achieved this season. For some, it might be difficult to gauge improvement without game action to confirm that growth.
Hawthorne knows he’s a better player today than he was when he arrived in Lexington.
“I can tell for 100% sure,” he said. “The game feels so much easier. When we play live — like from when I first got here, and I feel like I struggled, and I kind of didn’t know my identity. But now I can tell. I can tell a big difference, for sure.”
This story was originally published March 9, 2026 at 6:30 AM.
