In moving directly between UK and U of L, Vince Marrow will join a short list
Quick hitters from the Murray State baseball bandwagon:
21. Vince Marrow. The longtime Kentucky football recruiting ace’s impending move from Mark Stoops’ coaching staff to a position with Jeff Brohm’s Louisville program will put Marrow in rare, but not unprecedented, territory as a coach in a major sport moving directly between the archrivals.
20. Terry Hall. After going 79-54 as the U of L women’s basketball coach from 1975-80, Hall spurned the Cardinals and moved east down I-64 to become UK head coach.
19. How the switch worked out. At Kentucky, Hall went 138-66 from 1980 until resigning after the 1987 season.
18. Lamar Thomas. After coaching wide receivers for Louisville in 2014 and 2015 — and being the lead Cardinals recruiter who landed an overlooked Florida high school quarterback named Lamar Jackson — Thomas left Bobby Petrino’s U of L staff to accept the same position at UK.
17. How the switch worked out. After Thomas served two years at Kentucky — he did not land “the next Lamar Jackson” for UK — his contract was not renewed following the 2017 season.
16. Vince Marrow and Kentucky’s All-Americans. In the Mark Stoops coaching era (since 2013), UK has had six players earn AP All-America honors a total of seven times. Marrow was listed by 247Sports as the lead recruiter on three of the six.
15. Vince Marrow and Kentucky’s All-SEC players. Under Stoops, UK has had 16 players earn First Team All-SEC (either AP or coaches) honors a total of 18 times. Marrow was listed by 247Sports as the lead recruiter on four of the 16.
14. The “Thin Thirty” loses one. Bill Jenkins, an end on the 1962 Kentucky Wildcats football team that is known in UK sports lore as the “Thin Thirty,” died on June 4 at his home in Mexico Beach, Florida. Jenkins was 82.
13. Refused to quit. The “Thin Thirty” got its nickname from the number of players who made it through the brutal training techniques that then-new UK coach Charlie Bradshaw and his staff brought to the Wildcats program. Roughly 60 players quit the 1962 Cats. An Elizabethtown product, Jenkins was one of the hardy few who stuck it out.
12. “Last man standing.” In 2013, Jenkins shared with me what it had been like that first year playing under Bradshaw. “At that time, (UK) had these handball courts. Well, (the football staff) put up these pads all around those courts, then would send groups of football players in there and you had to fight your way out. Basically, the last man standing got out and everybody else in there was trying to put your body back together.”
11. Hat tip to the University of the Cumberlands. For the second straight school year, Cumberlands has won the Learfield Directors’ Cup in the NAIA division. The Directors’ Cup measures the all-around success of a school’s athletics department over a school year.
10. Kentucky men’s basketball experience. Last season, in his debut as top Cat, Mark Pope put the most experienced team ever to play at Kentucky on the floor. The 2024-25 Wildcats entered last year with a whopping 586 cumulative career stars on their roster.
9. Less-grizzled Cats. For the coming year, Kentucky’s roster has a combined 220 career college starts — Otega Oweh (73 starts), Jaland Lowe (50), Brandon Garrison (29), Kam Williams (28), Jayden Quaintance (24), Reece Potter (11) and Denzel Aberdeen (five).
8. Lexi Held. A Kentuckian is one of the feel-good stories of the early part of the 2025 WNBA season. A 2018 graduate of Cooper High School who starred in college at DePaul (2018-2022), the 5-foot-10 Held made the Phoenix Mercury this season as a free agent.
7. Putting points on the board. Over the past three Phoenix games (June 3 through June 7), Held is averaging 18 points a contest. The 24 points Held scored in an 86-77 win over Golden State on June 5 were, to that point in the season, the most by a rookie in a WNBA game this year.
6. Maddyn Greenway. The Kentucky Wildcats women’s basketball commit continues to wow the recruiting gurus. The 5-8 point guard from Minnesota’s Providence Academy is now ranked No. 8 in the class of 2026 by 247Sports, No. 10 by On3 and No. 11 by ESPN HoopGurlz.
5. Linnae Harper. Greenway still has some climbing to do to be the highest-rated player ever to sign with UK. Ranked No. 5 in the class of 2013 by ESPN HoopGurlz, Harper was the highest-ranked prospect to sign with Kentucky women’s basketball to date.
4. ZaKiyah Johnson. In the Kentucky Girls All-Stars’ two-game sweep of Indiana last weekend in the annual battle between the best high school senior players from each state, the commonwealth’s Miss Basketball averaged 31 points a game.
3. Going out in style. On Friday night at Lexington Catholic, the 6-foot Johnson had 28 points and 11 rebounds in an 84-73 Kentucky All-Stars win. At Gainbridge Fieldhouse in Indianapolis on Saturday night, Johnson, the Sacred Heart Academy star who is bound for LSU, came back with 34 points in a 106-103 double-overtime victory.
2. An epic career. Johnson’s achievements — four state titles, four state tournament MVPs, four Gatorade Kentucky Player of the Year awards, 2025 Miss Basketball, 2025 McDonald’s All-American — are unprecedented in Kentucky high school basketball.
1. Best our state has ever had. That’s why Johnson’s Kentucky All-Star heroics were a fitting, final flourish in what ranks as the greatest high school hoops career, by a female or a male, in the commonwealth’s history.
