Thursday Headlines: Mark Pope has healthiest team of his head coaching career

Posted by author November 7, 2024 Basketball

Dealing with injuries is often a difficult aspect of any sport, but it seems like Mark Pope is doing all that he can to keep his team healthy.

Pope, at his press conference earlier this week, spoke about the health of the team.

“We’re always playing with health. This is the healthiest I’ve had a team at this point in the season,” Pope said (a little past the 9-minute mark) after Kentucky’s season-opening win over Wright State. “This is the healthiest of any team I’ve had in my decade-long head-coaching, give or take a year or two. And we’ve been really meticulous.”

Meticulous is a key word to describe what they’re doing. That includes measuring everything through a company called Catapult that measures players’ workload, performance, development and more.

It also includes a focus on conditioning with the additions of Randy Towner, who came to Kentucky from the Milwaukee Bucks, and Brandon Wells, who was at Vanderbilt.

The analytics and data Kentucky is using is really interesting in regard to conditioning and player workload. Obviously injuries are a part of the game and can’t totally be taken out of the equation, but it certainly sounds like an interesting approach by the UK staff.