Kentucky Coach Mark Pope discussed how he builds relationships in the transfer portal

With the new day and age of college basketball players are coming and going from one school to another all the time. This means that coaches need to do a good job of building relationships because you never know when a player is going to hit the portal.

At his media day press conference, Mark Pope was asked about exactly this.

Here is what Coach Pope had to say about building relationships: "I think you're just as honest as you can be. Every recruit that I've ever recruited, this will be familiar. We're talking, and I'll be, like, come on, disagree with me, argue with me, ask me the uncomfortable question because that's when we know we've started talking. That's it. Can I get a recruit and a family to be, like, Coach, that's baloney, man, you just said this. I'm, like, now we're actually having a conversation. We're trusting each other enough to be honest, to really talk about the things that matter. What's interesting is a lot of times recruits through the process are going through the process of trying to discover themselves about what really matters to themselves. These are young guys, and so that exploratory process of human nature and kind of where they happen to be at their lives is incredibly dynamic. Every recruit is so unique, and so the sooner we can get down to, like, trusting each other enough to have honest conversations, the hard conversations, the controversial conversations, you know, the stuff that you feel uncomfortable talking about, but you probably need to, like, then you know that you're somewhere. The beautiful thing about it is you don't know where you're going to end up, but at least you're talking."