We’re in the honeymoon phase, but Mark Pope’s press conferences continue to fascinate as we learn more about the Kentucky player-turned-coach and his unique approach to the game. After the win over Wright State on Monday, we heard about the differences between the frontal cortex and limbic systems and how a referee symposium changed Pope’s outlook on officiating. Today, Pope brought more random and interesting knowledge as he previewed Saturday’s game vs. Bucknell.
Here are the five lines that stood out to me.
Selfies
When asked how he identifies unselfishness in recruiting, Pope said he likes to recruit players who think externally vs. internally. While explaining that concept, Pope talked about how society has changed over time to be more internally focused, using selfies as an example.
“If you think about it, 20 years ago, 30 years ago, there would have been some embarrassment about taking a selfie, right? Just the word itself is — when I was growing up, you would be like, ‘Man, what’s wrong with you? That’s weird to take a picture just of yourself.’ It just wasn’t even in your lexicon of concepts, right? And now it’s just a standard part of the way we live, and it’s not a good or a bad thing, it’s just so different, right? And so much of our life right now is focused on very much internal, and there’s not really that external vibe that is actually where all the magic happens in life I think.”
Mark Pope: much more of an “usie” guy than a “selfie” guy.
“I don’t have a Rorschach Test”
John Calipari used to joke that he didn’t have a magic wand to fix all of his team’s problems. Today, Pope joked that he doesn’t have a Rorschach Test to figure out which recruits are unselfish and which are not, referring to the inkblot tests psychologists use to examine a person’s personality characteristics and emotional functioning.
“When I say that this idea of somebody that understands that there’s something bigger than themselves, they can actually find more meaning in their own life by being outward focused, that’s probably important. Now diagnosing that, I don’t have a Rorschach test that’s going to tell me that exactly so it’s very much a feel right now for us, but that’s really important to us.”
Pope did say he has three criteria he uses in evaluating a player off the court.
“Can they sacrifice? Is there something bigger than themselves? And do they understand the standard? …If you find those three things someway in guys then you kind of have building blocks for somebody who you think, this is a growth mindset, a person we’re going to work with really well and do well in our system.”
The Catapult “Brain Drain”
You know something is complex when Mark Pope, a former Rhodes Scholar candidate, describes it as a “brain drain.” Those are the words he used when talking about the Catapult Basketball Movement Profile (BMP), a wearable device that quantifies and categorizes every type of basketball movement on the court (running, jumping, dynamic, active, settled). Kentucky is one of the many teams using Catapult’s devices, and Pope was practically giddy when describing how it will help the staff’s “really scientific approach to conditioning.” Most of it went over my head, but I’m pretty sure he said that with the Catapult’s help, he hopes the team reaches peak conditioning in mid-January.
“It’s a work in progress, it really is, but it’s interesting work. There are so many variables that it can become a little bit of a mental challenge, but we’re digging in hard. And it’s really important, this balance of living in the tension of having unbelievably high level, conditioned athletes at the right time of year for the right duration of time of the year, and also doing in a way where you’re giving yourself the best chance to be healthy.”
Me after listening to that:
“5 minutes of absolute quiet”
Kentucky plays Bucknell on Saturday, but the matchup vs. Duke in the Champions Classic on Tuesday looms large on the horizon. As fans, it’s hard not to look ahead. What about the players? Pope said that so far, he’s proud of how his team has tuned out distractions, telling reporters that for five minutes in each shootaround, he asks everyone in the room to be quiet so they can focus on being in the present.
“One of the things we do in shootaround is we’ll just have almost five minutes of absolute quiet in terms of any communication. We even had some people in the upper deck — they were working at the gym the other day — that I asked to please be quiet during those five minutes. For these guys, it’s probably the only five minutes during their entire week — including sleep — where they’re not having any external input. When you can focus, whether it’s by taking away the external input or by blocking it out — and usually it’s by both — that’s when you have real power to function and to perform at the highest level.
“When we think about Bucknell and Duke and the games down the road, all the things, it’s just like — all of that is great, it’s all real. Like, we recognize it, but what we practice, can we be right here, right now, having this conversation between you and me? If we can do that, there’s a lot of power in that, and that’s when we have a chance to perform the best we can.”
Good advice for us all.
So locked into the assignment he had no idea his team was in the World Series
How focused is Mark Pope on the assignment at hand? Even though he’s (sort of) a Yankees fan, he had no idea they were in the MLB Playoffs or even the World Series. That revelation came when he was asked how much he pays attention to what’s happening elsewhere in college basketball.
“That’s one of my big weaknesses: I don’t have a lot of context. I get really solid off what we do. I mean, I’ll hear scores. Like, I’m a Yankees fan-ish. Lite, right? And I actually had no idea what happened in the baseball playoffs. None, right? I heard the day after. And that’s actually — I’m not bragging about that. I need to build more context in my life.
“But one of my skills for good and bad is to be hyper, hyper-focused on where I am in the moment and kind of what our project is, and that’s probably, for me to be successful, that’s what’s required of me. I think some people are able to take in all the information everywhere and have crazy context and be focused, but that’s not really me. So I probably know less about what’s happening in the entire sports world than anybody in this room, but I probably know more about what’s happened with Kentucky basketball than everybody’s room.“
That’s the way we like it.
