How Mark Pope is preparing his BYU squad to storm the Big 12
An inside look within Pope’s program, where the Cougars have become college basketball’s surprise team of the season
www.deseret.com
We've seen all the positive stuff about his offense, but this had a little more in it about what he expects out of his teams and what he'll do...here are some quotes.
Hoods aren’t allowed in BYU’s meeting room. If you want to enter for film study, your head better not be buried in your sweatshirt.
During the offseason, head coach Mark Pope decided to tear down all of the office walls, replacing each opaque barrier with clear glass windows. “It used to feel super siloed,” Pope explains. “Now there’s nowhere you can go where you can’t see each other.” This increased visibility is just one of the ways Pope and his coaching staff are “turning over every rock,” as assistant Kahil Fennell puts it, in their approach for BYU’s inaugural campaign in the Big 12.
Resilience has become Pope’s favorite word over the past few months. Once a Rhodes Scholar candidate as an English major, Pope’s expansive vocabulary has no shortage of entries, yet everything always seems to come back to resilience. It bleeds into every conversation, every practice, every thought regarding the state of his program. Pope believes it’s at the center of every solution for any forthcoming challenge.
“We feel immense pressure, and I think it comes with all kinds of special complications at BYU, and I’m so grateful for that,” Pope says of the program’s Big 12 transition. “Pressure is a privilege, all the cliches are true. When you get to the end of whatever this athletic journey is, you just miss it desperately, and this is all you could ask for as an athlete or coaching staff.
It’s time to begin, and Pope has the floor. Basketball is about to dominate the next few hours, but he wants to put things in perspective beforehand. He expresses his desire for his players to “build incredible lives.” He shares that while he’s “dying” for each of them to compete at the next level, professional success should be the “fifth-most impressive thing in your life.” Much like what they hope to do in the Big 12 amid low outside expectations, Pope urges them to “chase more” in life.
