This offseason coaching gig could give Mark Pope and UK a recruiting advantage
AI-generated summary reviewed by our newsroom.
- UK basketball coach Mark Pope worked as a coach for USA Basketball earlier this summer.
- Pope got the chance to directly coach top college basketball recruits from the 2026 class.
- While with USA Basketball, Pope also coached UK players Jasper Johnson and Malachi Moreno.
As Mark Pope continues to try and establish himself as a top college basketball recruiter at Kentucky, there’s a potential ace in the hole that’s been unleashed for the second-year UK coach.
Earlier this summer, Pope served as a court coach during a USA Basketball training camp in Colorado that was used to determine the United States’ roster for the 2025 FIBA Under-19 World Cup, an event the Americans won in Switzerland.
That training camp included 32 participants, among them some of the nation’s top college basketball prospects.
Thirteen of the training camp’s participants were from the 2026 recruiting class. Among this elite group of rising high school seniors, nine have UK basketball scholarship offers and eight remain uncommitted as the fall official visit season looms.
Pope was far from the only college head coach that got the opportunity to directly work with these prospects in a USA Basketball setting.
The coaching staff for the final U-19 World Cup squad included Arizona’s Tommy Lloyd, Texas Tech’s Grant McCasland and Notre Dame’s Micah Shrewsberry. Pope was one of three college coaches that served as court coaches during the training camp, along with Alabama’s Nate Oats and North Carolina’s Hubert Davis.
To some extent, all of these coaches are trying to recruit the elite class of 2026 players who were at the USA Basketball camp.
But, by being in the gym and getting some one-on-one instruction time with these prospects, Pope might have given himself and his UK program a leg up as the 2026 recruiting picture comes into full view.
“When you get to deal with great players like that, they’re usually, almost without exception, incredible human beings also,” said Pope, who was making his USA Basketball coaching debut at the June training camp. “Because to make the sacrifice and do the work and have the commitment to get to that level, you usually have to be built pretty special. What a joy as a coach to be able to go do that.”
UK basketball is recruiting top USA Basketball players
The eight class of 2026 recruits who are still uncommitted, hold a Kentucky scholarship offer and were able to take in Pope’s on-court instruction at the June USA Basketball camp are guards Brandon McCoy, Taylen Kinney, Deron Rippey Jr. and Jordan Smith, and forwards Tajh Ariza, Christian Collins, Caleb Holt and Tyran Stokes.
“It was a great experience being coached by him. He taught me a lot of things,” Collins, a 6-foot-8 power forward who is the No. 2 overall prospect in the 2026 recruiting group, told the Herald-Leader about his time with Pope at the USA Basketball camp. “I got a little glimpse of what it would be like to be coached under him. He’s a really happy guy. He’s funny as well. He’s like a proud dad. (That’s) what he reminds me of. Yeah, he’s cool.”
There’s a direct line between the prospects who got some early on-court time with Pope and UK’s upcoming recruiting schedule.
Each of Rippey, Holt, Smith and Collins have recruiting visits set up to Kentucky in the near future.
Rippey, who has Kentucky among his top 12 schools, will be on campus at the start of August. Holt is set to visit Lexington in the middle of September. Both Collins and Smith are scheduled to visit UK during the second weekend of October, which is expected to be Big Blue Madness weekend.
Stokes, the consensus top player in the 2026 recruiting group and a Louisville native, visited Kentucky in early June, prior to the USA Basketball training camp.
Mark Pope also coached Johnson, Moreno at USA Basketball
Pope wasn’t the only Big Blue presence at that USA Basketball training camp.
Among the 32 players there were incoming Kentucky freshmen Jasper Johnson and Malachi Moreno. That exposure to Pope at the training camp was also the first time Pope directly coached those new Wildcats.
“It was almost like a cheat code with Coach (Pope) being there, being able to get a real look at how he coaches and being able to see what it would be like when we came back,” Moreno said. “And also being able to play against other top guys in the country. It made all of us a lot better and got us a little more prepared for what’s to come.”
What was Moreno’s initial reaction to being coached by Pope for the first time?
“This is going to be such an easy coach to play for,” Moreno said. “He’s a big teacher and I’m here to be a sponge and just listen and take what he says and hopefully apply it to my game.”
“I was so happy to have the opportunity to go coach those guys,” Pope added about coaching Johnson and Moreno in the USA Basketball setting. “Because we’d been waiting for so long to actually be on the court and be able to talk to them on the court with a ball … I was looking forward to that from the day that we made the arrangement.”
For his part, Moreno emphasized the one-on-one time that he and Johnson got with Pope while the trio were in Colorado.
“Being able to have our coach there at USA with us, being able to represent the country, but also be able to have that one-on-one time, it also helped out a lot,” said Moreno, who suffered a hip strain during the training camp, which played a role in his exclusion from the U.S. World Cup roster.
Pope also traveled to Switzerland during the World Cup to watch the final 12-player American team, which included Johnson, along with UK recruits Holt, McCoy, Smith and Stokes. Johnson ended up averaging 8.0 points, 1.6 assists and 1.3 rebounds in 15.4 minutes per game as part of the Americans’ gold medal effort.
As you might expect, plenty of recruiting also takes place behind the scenes at an event like this, with Johnson likely taking some time to spread the good word of Kentucky to his U.S. teammates.
There’s a track record of Johnson having success in this regard. Just last week, the 6-foot-4 guard who began his prep career at Woodford County spoke about how he helped recruit transfer forward Jayden Quaintance (a former AAU teammate of Johnson’s) to UK.
Following the July evaluation periods, Kentucky has now extended 17 scholarship offers to uncommitted prospects in the 2026 recruiting class. Pope and the Wildcats are still in pursuit of their first commitment from the rising high school senior group, but the UK coach now can draw on a special connection with some top prospects in this pursuit.
