Report-Kentucky Wildcats men’s basketball to hold open tryout

Mark Pope, the men’s basketball coach at Kentucky, declared on Friday that prospective walk-ons for the 2024–25 season will have the opportunity to try out for the team at an open tryout later this month.

Interested athletes should provide their height, weight, position, and contact details for their high school basketball coach to the Wildcats, a preseason top-25 squad.

All full-time, academically qualified students in Kentucky are welcome to try out. The release states that the team will invite selected hopefuls to the tryout on August 30 after narrowing down its list of possible walk-ons.

Kentucky is hardly the first blue-blood college basketball program to host an open audition, despite the fact that they are uncommon.

This was exactly the kind of tryout that Louisville coach Kenny Payne organized last year, asking fans to bring walk-ons “our way” as the team needed more talent after a difficult season.

Several players’ injuries forced TCU to add four walk-ons during the open audition period for the women’s basketball team last season.

To be clear, this is not the case in Kentucky.

Transfers Jaxson Robinson and Lamont Butler will lead the Wildcats, along with a group of players that Pope, who as a player assisted Kentucky in winning a national championship in 1996, has assembled for his first year of coaching.