Mark Pope’s gift to the BBN is something Cats fans haven’t seen in 20 years
As these words are typed, it is 79 days until the 2025-26 Kentucky Wildcats men’s basketball team will take the court under competitive conditions for the first time.
On Oct. 24, likely preseason No. 1 Purdue will visit Rupp Arena to take on the Cats in what will be a needle-moving exhibition game.
Yet months before the Wildcats men’s hoops campaign unoficially begins, Mark Pope has already assured the Big Blue Nation that it will see something this winter that Kentucky backers have not witnessed in exactly two decades.
For Pope’s second season as top Cat, UK will have four homegrown products of the commonwealth of Kentucky on men’s basketball scholarship.
The presence of Trent Noah (Harlan County), Malachi Moreno (Great Crossing High School in Georgetown), Jasper Johnson (Lexington native, ex-Woodford County player) and Reece Potter (Lexington Catholic) on the UK roster gives the Wildcats four recruited, scholarship Kentuckians on the same team for the first time in 20 years.
If you are among those Cats fans who believe the “UK basketball experience” is just better when there are homestate players for which to root, you should be headed toward a season to relish.
On what is expected to be a roster deep with legitimate playing options, it is unclear how big a role the “homegrown four” will have for Kentucky in 2025-26. But it seems realistic that well-regarded incoming freshmen Johnson and Moreno and perhaps sophomore sharpshooter Noah will contend for “rotation roles” for the Wildcats this season.
A willowy 7-foot-1, 215-pound transfer from Miami (Ohio), Potter figures to provide insurance for UK at the center position behind junior Brandon Garrison, sophomore transfer Jayden Quaintance and Moreno (A junior, Potter might even benefit from a developmental redshirt season if anyone does that anymore in the current freewheeling era of player mobility in college sports).
The last time a UK men’s hoops roster featured four homegrown products as recruited, scholarship players was in 2005-06.
What would turn out to be Tubby Smith’s penultimate Kentucky team boasted Rajon Rondo (Louisville), Patrick Sparks (Central City), Brandon Stockton (Glasgow) and Jared Carter (Georgetown).
For 2025-26, had former Lyon County star Travis Perry returned to Kentucky for what would have been his sophomore season rather than transferring to Mississippi — and assuming UK still brought Potter in as a transfer — the Cats could then have had five native sons on scholarship on one roster.
You have to go all the way back to 1991-92, Rick Pitino’s third year as UK head coach, to find the last time a Wildcats roster boasted five instate products.
John Pelphrey (Paintsville), Deron Feldhaus (Maysville), Richie Farmer (Manchester), Travis Ford (Madisonville) and Chris Harrison (Tollesboro) were part of a memorable season.
In Kentucky’s first year of NCAA Tournament eligibility following a stern NCAA probation, the Wildcats went 29-7, won the 1992 SEC Tournament and were Christian Laettner’s famed overtime buzzer beater away from what might well have been UK’s sweetest Final Four trip ever.
Alas, the 2005-06 Cats, with the four Kentuckians on scholarship, did not fare as well. That season, UK finished a pedestrian (by Kentucky standards) 22-13 and lost to Connecticut in the NCAA tourney round of 32.
Where Kentucky backers were exhilarated by the 1991-92 season and have warm feelings even now toward the homestate standouts from that team, there are few nostalgic memories of the 2005-06 Cats campaign.
There’s a lesson in that about instate recruiting for Pope — and the current UK coaches in other sports, too.
However popular it might be on the front end to recruit homegrown prospects, the only way people feel positive about it on the back end is if the players are good enough to help UK win at the level to which Kentucky fans aspire.
That lesson was driven home two seasons ago by the UK women’s basketball program. In 2023-24, the Wildcats roster boasted three previous winners of the Kentucky Miss Basketball Award — Ryle’s Maddie Scherr (2020 Miss Basketball), Franklin County’s Brooklynn Miles (2021) and Anderson County’s Amiya Jenkins (2022).
Yet after that team finished 12-20, head coach Kyra Elzy was relieved of her coaching duties and all three of the prior Kentucky Miss Basketball winners transferred away from UK to other schools.
Moral of that story: For a Kentucky Wildcats coach, there’s no magic to having a heavily home-tinted roster if that doesn’t lead to ample and meaningful winning.
It is Pope’s good fortune to have inherited the Kentucky men’s basketball head coaching position at a time of a relative uptick in the quality of instate boys hoops talent.
For those fans who like to have some “Kentucky” in their experience of UK basketball, the fact that there are multiple homegrown talents who could log important minutes for what is expected to be a strong Wildcats team in 2025-26 should be exciting.
