By Russ Brown
Photos by: UofL Athletics/Adam Creech
The foundation of Pat Kelsey’s first University of Louisville basketball team is in place -- assistant coaches have been hired, a support staff is hard at work and most importantly, all 13 recruits have signed on the dotted line.
Kelsey has wiped the slate clean of any incriminating evidence from former coach Kenny Payne, whose two-year tenure ended with an historically bad 12-52 overall record that included 5-37 against ACC competition. Not only is Payne gone (he was recently named associate head coach at Arkansas by John Calipari, his former boss at Kentucky), along with every other staff member, but there is also a totally new cast of players.
With every scholarship player from last season having left for other programs, Kelsey made liberal use of the transfer portal to build the roster from the ground up, signing just one high school prospect in 4-star wing Khani Rooths. UofL is one of only two Division I teams in the country that will enter the 2024-25 season with an all-new roster, the other being Calipari’s Razorbacks.
UofL stats guru Kelly Dickey noted that UofL hasn’t had a team with zero returning players since the 1943-44 club, most of whom were Navy trainees attending the school during World War II.
All the newcomers arrived on campus during the first week of June and have completed the three weeks of supervised summer workouts allowed by the NCAA.
Now comes the hardest and most important part: winning games. We won’t learn the early results of Kelsey’s first building block for another four months or so, beginning with UofL’s season-opening game on Nov. 4 against Morehead State in the KFC Yum! Center. Until then, we’ll have to take the coach’s word for it, and judging from some of those words since his hiring on March 28th, he has high hopes for his first group of Cardinals.
“I like the overall makeup of our team,” he says. “I love the DNA of our team, I love what they’re about. The first 70 days were a whirlwind. But now it’s settled down a little bit. You’re able to take a deep breath and focus on what you do best and what you love the most. And that’s coach guys up, put your team together. So it’s been awesome. We feel really, really good, after the dust has settled, about the roster we’ve been able to assemble.
“It’s a painstaking process. We’re very particular and thorough in the guys that we go after. We have sets of standards both from an X and O standpoint, and a schematic standpoint, an analytical standpoint, a player profile standpoint. Then obviously the makeup of the individual for the fit in our culture are the high standards we have and we try not to equivocate on them. We go to great lengths to do our due diligence and peel away the onion as we like to say. We think we have put together a roster that really fits what we do, both on the court and off.”
While the players will be new to The Ville, it will be an experienced group due to the transfers from various programs, many of whom have NCAA Tournament experience. The trio of Aboubacar Traore (Long Beach State), Terrence Edwards Jr. (James Madison) and Chucky Hepburn (Wisconsin) are all career 1,000-point scorers. Three transfer additions are veterans of Kelsey’s former team at College of Charleston, while others are from BYU, Colorado, Georgia, Maryland, South Florida and Washington.
UofL’s portal haul is ranked in the top five nationally, including No. 1 by On3Sports, and the Cards have also already been mentioned as a dark horse contender that could possibly challenge Duke and North Carolina for the ACC title.
“I think a hallmark of this team, and part of its true identity, is the maturity,” Kelsey says. “We have a bunch of old heads, guys that have logged a ton of minutes at a high level of college basketball. And not only that, but they have come from winning programs. As they say in college basketball now, it’s important to get old and stay old.
“You know, if you have a roster full of high school guys, now it’s really, really important to have a balanced roster as we move forward. And you have homegrown and you have grassroots recruits and you’re recruiting freshmen, and you’re cultivating them and growing them and building them. . .That will be a major part of our program. But I think having an older, mature roster is always going to be key to being a great program as you move forward and we have that.”
Another aspect of the Cards’ collective on-court personality both in practice and in games, according to Kelsey, will be a ferocious competitiveness, with their coach as Exhibit A. Kelsey said he inherited his competitive edge from his father, who built an auto dealership business in Lawrenceburg, Ind., as well as from watching the Cincinnati Reds’ Pete Rose as a kid growing up in the Queen City.
“I’m pretty competitive, probably overboard at times,” Kelsey said. “But I mean, it’s what’s awesome about being in coaching, right? You compete every single day in every aspect of your job. If you’re going into second base, you’re going in headfirst. You’re eating some dirt on the way in there. That’s just how we play. One of the core tenants of our program: We compete every single day on the court. Nothing’s given, everything’s earned. That’s part of the DNA of our program.”
Hopefully, it will all come together starting in November, then continue to progress into March. Although UofL’s complete schedule won’t be released until late August or September, many of its non-conference opponents are known. In addition to Morehead, the Cards will host Tennessee on Nov. 9, Winthrop on Nov. 22 and Eastern Kentucky on Dec. 28. Their annual Battle of the Bluegrass against Kentucky is set for Dec. 14 in Rupp Arena and they will face Ole Miss in the ACC/SEC Challenge on Dec. 3 in the KFC Yum! Center.
UofL will also compete in the Battle for Atlantis at Atlantis Paradise Island in the Bahamas Nov. 27-29, joining Arizona, Davidson, Gonzaga, Indiana, Oklahoma, Providence and West Virginia. Pairings have not been announced.
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