Coach Mark Pope’s first roster of Kentucky Wildcats is entering week five of summer practice, the halfway mark of their earliest preparations for the 2024-25 college basketball season. And while those workouts will remain top of mind for Pope and his UK coaching staff, some of their attention will be elsewhere this month. July remains the busiest time for offseason recruiting, with three separate evaluation periods spread over nine days as the shoe company circuits wrap up their grassroots campaigns and other major events pepper the schedule. The first July eval period was actually last week, and the Kentucky staff tipped things off Thursday with plenty of travel — Pope and Jason Hart scouting Adidas players in South Carolina, associate head coach Alvin Brooks III in Phoenix for an event, and Cody Fueger checking in on some international talent at an Atlanta showcase. The second eval period of the month starts Friday, and it might be the biggest. This weekend will feature the final games of Nike’s Peach Jam — the sport’s premier shoe company league — as well as major events from Adidas and Under Armour. The Wildcats have about a dozen scholarship offers out to prospects in the 2025 class, and this week on the calendar has traditionally been a pivotal one for getting final looks at top stars before their senior years of high school begin. For Pope and company, it will be an especially intriguing time. Of the 12 scholarship players on Kentucky’s roster for the 2024-25 season, seven are entering their final year of NCAA eligibility. That means Pope will have at least seven spots to fill next offseason, and while some of those additions will undoubtedly come from the transfer portal, UK is looking for an infusion of talent from the high school ranks. This won’t be Pope’s first look at those elite 2025 recruits as UK’s coach. There was one major evaluation period in May — about a month after he took the Kentucky job — and some other big events in June, as well as a couple of international trips to scout American and overseas talent. But July often acts as a sorting period for top prospects and the coaches recruiting them. Some have already started to whittle their list of options. Others will follow in the coming weeks. So what, exactly, will Pope and his assistant coaches be looking for this month? “Guys that can shoot the basketball — that’s really important,” Fueger told the Herald-Leader recently. “Guys that are skilled. Those are two things that are super important to Coach. And then, obviously, you look at everything from all their percentages. And every position is a little bit different — what we’re looking for in bigs and guards and all of that. But being able to shoot and being skilled are things that are super important to us.” That’s one departure from the previous era of Kentucky basketball, when John Calipari often prioritized length and athleticism on the recruiting trail. Obviously, Calipari wanted skilled guys who could shoot, too — and he landed plenty of them — but, generally speaking, those weren’t the top two traits that came to mind when thinking of the prototypical UK recruit of the past 15 years. Calipari’s final Kentucky team led the country in 3-point shooting, thanks largely to his last three UK draft picks — Reed Sheppard, Rob Dillingham and Antonio Reeves — but ending up anywhere near the top of the national lists in 3-point stats was an outlier for his tenure. Pope’s offense — with Fueger instrumental in running the show — will be predicated on fast play, getting up lots of 3-point shots and making the right reads on and off the ball. And fitting into such a system will, in some cases, warrant a different recruiting profile than the one that typically attracted Calipari.
