What will be different about Kentucky basketball’s rebooted approach to recruiting?
With the NCAA’s “dead period” finally over, college campuses have reopened for high school basketball prospects, and coaches will soon be back on the recruiting trail to get a look at those players in person.
For Kentucky, the return to normalcy will coincide with massive change. Both in personnel and, apparently, approach.
When college coaches were last permitted to host recruits on campus and see them in person off campus — back in early 2020, before the COVID-19 shutdown — John Calipari’s staff of assistants consisted of Kenny Payne, Tony Barbee and Joel Justus.
All three of those coaches are gone, with Orlando Antigua, Chin Coleman and Jai Lucas now holding their positions. Lucas, viewed as one of the top young assistants in the country, arrived in Lexington late last summer, but the next couple of months will bring his first chance to host recruits on UK’s campus and evaluate prospects on Kentucky’s behalf on the recruiting trail.
Antigua, of course, has been here before — a UK assistant from 2009 to 2014 — and he and Coleman, who were both hired last month, spent the past four seasons together at Illinois.
Until the start of UK basketball camps last week, the three hadn’t interacted as a group.
“They’ve been great,” Lucas said at the Ashland camp Thursday. “This is really the first week that we’ve gotten to really interact and be around each other. So getting to be around them, getting to interact with them, they’ve been amazing.”
Despite the fresh introductions, a common theme has been forming among this trio, one that harkens back to the early days of the Calipari era, and one that might be a switch from recent years.
These assistants have ample on-the-court chops, but an obvious goal of bringing this group of coaches together will be to once again dominate the recruiting trail. All three bring a reputation as successful recruiters and relationship-builders, and expectations on that front moving forward will be oversized, even by Calipari-era standards.
Asked last week what he expected the recruiting dynamic to look like with this new staff, Lucas offered a telling response.
“I think the biggest thing is just being on the same page,” he said. “Everybody doing a little bit of communication in recruiting. And it’s not just, ‘Oh, this guy is recruiting this guy.’ We’re all, ‘The University of Kentucky is recruiting this guy.’ And I think that’s the one thing that will be a big difference, and something that’ll be a little bit different than it has been in the past.”
Kentucky had plenty of recruiting successes in the five years that the staff consisted of Payne, Barbee and Justus, but that period was also marked — both inside and outside the program — by a perception of disjointedness in the approach to recruiting.
While there was collaboration within the staff, narratives quickly formed that individual targets were “Payne guys” or “Barbee guys” or “Justus guys,” depending on who was viewed as UK’s lead recruiter in each case. And, in many instances, there was a sense that the collaboration was lacking, that the proper communication wasn’t there.
Perhaps sensing that disconnect, Calipari reconfigured his staff before the 2020-21 season, basically setting up a two-pronged approach with Justus and the newly arrived Lucas at the top, organizing Kentucky’s recruiting efforts.
“I want you on that recruiting 10 hours a day,” Calipari said of the duo.
That plan, while looking good on paper, never had a chance in the short term.
The restrictions in place for COVID-19 completely revamped recruiting, relegating coaches to Zoom meetings and phone calls rather than in-person visits and evaluations. By the time the dead period was lifted last week, Justus had moved on to Arizona State.
Kentucky’s new recruiting dynamic
The NCAA rules were a little different when Calipari first came to Kentucky in 2009.
Then, only two assistant coaches were allowed to be on the recruiting trail alongside the head coach. In year one, that meant Antigua and Rod Strickland were often UK’s main recruiters behind Calipari, with Strickland moving to an administrative role in 2010 and Payne replacing him.
It was in those first few years that UK had its most successful recruiting run, coinciding with its most success on the court. It was a few years later, when the NCAA allowed three assistants to actively recruit, that the perception of a splintered approach began to set in at Kentucky.
Longtime Calipari assistant John Robic — an integral part of the UK staff from a game-planning and opposition-research perspective — was moved to a new position, in part, to keep him active with those duties so a third assistant could be added to focus more on off-campus recruiting.
Obviously, the college basketball landscape on and off the court has changed considerably since those early, unbelievably successful days of the Calipari era, but the UK coach’s plan for Justus, who was able to bring in many of the team’s top players over the past few years, and Lucas to head up the Cats’ recruiting efforts seemed like a throwback to that early dynamic.
Moving forward, that appears to be what Antigua, Coleman and Lucas have in mind.
When asked last month about his own recruiting success in his first stint here, Antigua redirected that credit. He talked about “a lot of great synergy and togetherness” on those early Kentucky coaching staffs.
“I was a part of a really, really good team. I didn’t get anybody,” he said. “We were able to go and recruit and get (players). I was just happy to be a spoke in that wheel, and it’s that same kind of wheel that we have now is how we’re going to approach our recruiting.”
Antigua and Coleman were able to amass and help develop enough talent at Illinois that the program reached the status of a No. 1 seed in the NCAA Tournament in year four of a rebuild last season. More importantly for Kentucky’s future, the two coaches, who had known each other before teaming up in Champaign, found that they worked well together.
“He and I have an unbelievable chemistry. Our connection is unbelievable,” Coleman said. “We’re really, really tight and we’re like brothers. We’re able to work really well alongside one another, and that just makes for a strong union.”
Lucas is looking forward to joining that dynamic.
Last week, the 32-year-old assistant talked very much in terms of a team approach to the recruiting trail, one that values collaboration and communication as Kentucky’s basketball program redoubles its efforts to bring the nation’s best prospects to Lexington.
The first test of this new coaching configuration is coming soon. The first round of official visits hosted by Kentucky in 15 months will start a few days from now, with class of 2022 commitment Skyy Clark coming to campus this weekend and other visits set up for later in the month.
In July, the shoe company circuits return with 10 days set aside for in-person evaluation over a three-week period. It’ll be the first time in more than seven years that Antigua is out on the recruiting trail wearing UK blue, and it’ll be the first opportunity to do so for Coleman and Lucas.
It won’t be long before this coaching staff’s first commitments will start rolling in. The goal is clear, and the approach will be interesting to watch.
“I think the biggest thing is just getting the best player we can find, and then we’ll kind of figure it out from there,” Lucas said. “And I think that’s the one thing that Coach Cal has always preached — the way basketball is going, it’s really going positionless. So you need somebody who can dribble, pass and shoot, whether they’re 5-10 or 6-11. So I think if we can get the best player we can find, then it doesn’t matter what size or what position they are. We’ll figure out a way to play him.”
