Step inside the Joe Craft Center this week, and the first thing to catch your eye is likely to be a sign of the lofty expectations Mark Pope is bringing to his first season as head coach of the Kentucky Wildcats. A few feet inside the front door of the basketball practice facility — there to greet anyone who enters, positioned within plain sight of the UK coaches’ office suite — a flat-screen TV mounted on the wall features an image of Pope and his team huddled up on the court.
Across the top of that image, there’s a graphic of the eight national championship banners hanging in the Rupp Arena rafters. And right smack in the middle: the NCAA title trophy. Two words complete the picture on the screen, displayed in all caps with black and blue lettering … “BANNER CAMP.”
Pope didn’t shy away from the annual expectations surrounding the UK basketball team when he took the job in April, embracing the standard of hanging banners in Rupp Arena, which hasn’t welcomed a new one since the 2015 Final Four. It’s been more than 12 years since the Wildcats’ last NCAA title — the lone national championship during their 15 seasons under John Calipari — and that was the only prize referenced on the TV screen in the Craft Center as official practice for the 2024-25 season tipped off this week.
Banner Camp” began at 6 a.m. Monday, with Pope’s 12 scholarship players and five assistant coaches — all of them newcomers to Kentucky basketball — hitting the court bright and early.
This wasn’t their first time sharing the floor together, of course. The team was permitted to practice for eight weeks over the summer, but those sessions were limited to four hours per week — typically divided into four one-hour practices per week — and the same rules applied when the fall semester began. Starting this week, the schedule is dramatically different.
The Cats are allowed to practice for 20 hours per week over the six weeks leading up to their season opener — the first game of the Pope era — against Wright State in Rupp Arena on Nov. 4. With some exceptions, the plan in the early going is for UK to hold two-a-days on Mondays and Thursdays, while taking Wednesdays and Sundays off, with regular practice sessions slated for the other three days of the week. Early takeaways? “Well, we’ve been practicing since June, so now we’re just going longer,” assistant coach Jason Hart told the Herald-Leader following practice No. 4. “What we saw in June — you know, we know what we have.”