A UK basketball coach with a unique past. And an interesting approach to recruiting.
Mark Pope had just landed his dream job: head coach at the University of Kentucky, his beloved alma mater and one of college basketball’s blue bloods.
Jason Hart didn’t have a job at all, recently losing his gig as the head coach of G League Ignite after the NBA decided to shutter the program due, primarily, to the NCAA’s reforms to its longstanding name, image and likeness rules.
And so the two men who first got to know each other nearly 25 years earlier were at a crossroads. Pope was tasked with stocking the personnel of one of the sport’s greatest programs from scratch. Hart found himself unemployed — through no fault of his own — faced with figuring out the best next step for his coaching career.
He wasn’t a free agent for long.
Hart, 46, and Pope — six years his senior — got to know each other well during the 2000-01 season that they shared in the Milwaukee Bucks organization, which was Hart’s rookie year in the league. They followed each other’s careers from afar after that, and — a decade later — both were college coaches.
There were friendly exchanges when they found themselves in the same gym, but they weren’t close enough that they were keeping in regular contact.
So, when Pope landed the Kentucky job, Hart didn’t reach out to offer congratulations at first, figuring his former teammate was being inundated by such well wishes at one of the busiest times in his life.
So, imagine Hart’s surprise when he received a text message
Completely out of the blue — from the new Kentucky coach, asking if he’d be interested in moving with him to Lexington.
“Fortunately, he reached out to me,” Hart said, sitting in an office in the UK basketball practice facility, decked out in Wildcats gear. “… I had a lot of college options. I didn’t know what I was going to do. I had some pro options, too. So I just went home. I was fairly unemployed for a short period of time.
And then I got this opportunity with Coach Pope, and, you know, to get back in college at this level — that was suitable for me. Because I wanted to stay recruiting. Either I was going to go pro or stay recruiting at the level that I was recruiting at.”
Pope’s first UK roster features 12 scholarship players that had never played for the Wildcats
His first Kentucky staff includes only one assistant coach that had ever worked for him. That assistant, Cody Fueger, was officially announced as the first member of Pope’s UK staff at 4:47 p.m. on April 22.
That Fueger would follow Pope to Kentucky was assumed in college basketball circles from basically the moment the head coach got the job. Nineteen minutes after Fueger’s hire was officially announced, UK put out a press release saying Hart was also joining the staff.
Pope recently called Hart a “no-brainer” hire for him, adding that if his former teammate hadn’t taken the G League Ignite job three years ago, he’d be a head coach somewhere else by now. And he implied that he might not be able to hold onto him for long.
“He could be an assistant coach on an NBA bench next year and be a head coach in the NBA two years from now,” Pope said. “Like, he’s that good.”
