UK basketball had gone stale. How Mark Pope and Kenny Brooks have given fans new hope.

In the annals of Kentucky Wildcats basketball history — women’s and men’s — these past few seasons will be remembered as a time of program stagnation .

For a frustrated fan base unhappy with the direction of its hoops programs, new UK coaches Mark Pope and Kenny Brooks have served as a healing tonic.

Ultimately, Pope’s tenure as Kentucky men’s basketball coach and Brooks’ run as UK women’s head coach will be determined on the court by wins and losses. At the level at which the University of Kentucky competes, that’s the ultimate benchmark for any coach.

Nevertheless, I am not sure I have ever seen two coaches more decisively win their first offseasons in new jobs than Pope and Brooks have.

Let’s stipulate that the primary issue that led John Calipari into self-exile at Arkansas was a failure over his final four years to win to the “Kentucky standard.”

As his UK tenure from 2009 through 2024 played out, though, Calipari also had a marketing problem. Calipari seemed to direct his considerable sales skills almost exclusively at recruits, and he really didn’t deliver a message to Kentucky fans.

His pitch to players was come to UK as the quickest route to the NBA. His theory seemed to be that the winning that would come from attracting the top talent year after year would negate any need to market to the fans.

Even when UK went to four Final Fours in five years from 2011 through 2015, including claiming the 2012 NCAA title, some Kentucky fans chafed at the NBA-centric messaging Calipari deployed to sell Wildcats basketball.

When Kentucky went 1-3 in NCAA Tournament games and 1-4 in SEC Tournament contests over Calipari’s final four years, the NBA-focused tone of Cal’s sales pitch became an all-out irritant to a good percentage of the Big Blue Nation.

Since being named the new Wildcats head coach, the 52-year-old Pope has striven to put the “Kentucky” back into Kentucky basketball.

Symbolically, Pope had the individual pictures of former UK players playing in the NBA that hung in the Kentucky men’s basketball practice facility during the Calipari era removed. Conversely, Pope still has up banners signifying the Wildcats’ eight prior NCAA championships.

At his introductory news conference — before a robust crowd of some 19,000 at Rupp Arena — Pope vowed that “all of the future (UK) players will learn really quick, OK, that they are not doing (Kentucky) jerseys a favor by letting the jerseys clothe them. Our guys will know quickly … (that) it will be one of the great honors of their life to put that jersey on.”

Whether or not it is a smart recruiting approach, that sentiment was what much of an exasperated Wildcats fan base yearned to hear.

Before Brooks arrived, Kentucky women’s basketball was in a dispiriting period of retrenchment .

After UK had made 11 of the prior 12 NCAA tournaments, Kentucky went a combined 24-39 in the final two seasons of Kyra Elzy’s four-year head coaching run from 2020 through 2024.

Prior to stepping away from the UK job for personal reasons, Matthew Mitchell had done good work as Kentucky women’s hoops coach from 2007 through 2020. Mitchell utilized an entertaining, full-court pressing style to turn the Wildcats into a perennial top-20 program.

However, Mitchell was never able to pierce the very highest level of women’s college hoops. Under his watch, UK lost three times in the NCAA Tournament Elite Eight and four times in SEC Tournament finals.

There are Wildcats fans who believe the standards for Kentucky basketball — men’s and women’s — should be the same. Among that segment of the BBN, frustration over the fact that UK has yet to send its women’s team to even one Final Four is strong.

Enter Brooks, who coached Virginia Tech to the 2023 Final Four and to the 2024 ACC regular season title. Giving up an ACC job he had made into one of that league’s best, Brooks has come to Lexington vowing to use the Kentucky basketball brand to finally make UK an elite program.

“A sleeping giant that needs to be awakened” is how Brooks described Kentucky women’s basketball at his introductory news conference.

In seeking to elevate UK to the top of women’s hoops, the 55-year-old Brooks will derive the benefit of the $80 million-plus investment that the University of Kentucky has made to renovate Memorial Coliseum.

The infusion of cash has transformed the venerable on-campus Memorial, opened in December 1950, from an aging eyesore into a state-of-the-art hoops palace.

“Our expectations are to win,” Brooks said on the day he was introduced as UK’s head coach. “Obviously, I’m not going to disrespect the SEC and how powerful it is and we know that we have to do a lot of work to get to that point. You can’t just sprinkle magic dust on it and say, ‘Hey, we are going to win a national championship.’ A lot of work has to go into it — and we are willing to do that.”

Time will tell, of course, whether the coaching tenures of Brooks and Pope go as well as have their initial offseasons.

Still, after years when Kentucky basketball fan frustrations have been boiling, there are fresh breezes blowing through the commonwealth.

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