College Basketball Coach Ordered To Stop Screaming At Team Amid Frustrating Start To Season
Gotta save the vocals for the game.
Kentucky head basketball coach Mark Pope seems to be a genuinely good dude, but even the nicest of college basketball coaches scream on occasion, and the Wildcats have given him plenty of excuses to do so throughout the start of their campaign.
Nobody has had a better seat to watch the Wildcats start the year with a 7-4 record. All four of those losses have come courtesy of ranked opponents, but the average scoring margin of 18.2 points has led to some shouting.
So much shouting, in fact, that doctors have ordered Pope to stop screaming at his team. He told reporters on Monday that doctors ordered him to specifically not speak over a "conversational volume for the next couple of days."
Thankfully for Pope and his voice's sake, Kentucky is in the middle of a seven-day break between games, but it's a safe bet that he'll ignore the doctor's orders this upcoming Saturday when Kentucky takes on St. John's in Atlanta.
In all seriousness, telling a basketball coach that they can't yell for a couple of days is like telling any regular person that they can't blink. You have to raise your voice above conversational level to get anything across to players during practice, let alone in a game atmosphere.
Kentucky, which began the season ranked inside the Top 10, is coming off its best win of the season after knocking off Indiana 72-60 on December 13. Despite already having four losses on the year, the Wildcats are sitting just fine in the KenPom rankings (19) and NET rankings (27) with their SEC schedule getting underway at Alabama coming up on January 3.