Craig Skinner gives Mark Pope advice on finding consistent greatness at Kentucky

Ask any Big Blue Nation member right now who they feel is the best coach on campus at the University of Kentucky. I’d be stunned if their answer wasn’t Craig Skinner, who just led the Wildcats to their second volleyball Final Four in a half-decade while also sitting comfortably as heavy favorites to bring home a second national championship in the same span, too.

They’ve won nine straight SEC regular-season titles, then just brought home the SEC Tournament trophy for good measure, too. There is a standard of excellence that is simply not being met anywhere else in Lexington — nothing against the other programs, just all respect for Skinner and the culture he’s built with 21 consecutive NCAA Tournament appearances.

How does he do it year after year? Mark Pope is dying to know, the second-year coach asking Skinner on his call-in radio show on Monday how he’s been so consistent for decades leading the volleyball program.

“Your ability to be so consistently great with your team year after year after year,” Pope said. “Talk to us about some of the things that have helped you and your staff and your team be this consistently excellent.”

“I don’t know if there’s a perfect answer,” Skinner responded. “We’ve been fortunate, for one, to have great people on staff. You know as well as I do that people attract other people, and high achievers want to be around other high achievers. I think early on, we just tried to identify two positions that we felt like we needed to be very good at every single year and build our program around that. And, obviously, it took a while to get superstars around those two positions, but the two positions we felt were super important to be consistent were libero and setter — which is like your point guard and your defensive anchor.

“We felt like if we had those two positions nailed down each and every year, we’d have a chance, and we could compete. And then we just really started to try and go after some of the high point scorers and things like that.”

For the Wildcats this year, those players were Kassie O’Brien at setter and Molly Tuozzo at libero — plus Eva Hudson and Brooklyn DeLeye as the superstar outside hitters. They’re a loaded group from top to bottom, but Skinner started with a core foundation and worked his way around those pieces to build his next Final Four roster.

The key, though? And it’s something Pope may be dealing with himself on the recruiting trail as he fights off roster construction questions and finding the right guys for next season.

“One of the hardest things to do as a coach, sometimes, is to say no,” Skinner said. “Because there are players that want to be part of your program, and if they aren’t who you are — but they’re a great athlete, so everyone else wants them — it’s really hard to say no. I think we’ve done a good job of that as much as anything and really found the people that fit who we are.”

Pope was particularly interested in the Wildcats’ ability to rally down 2-0 in sets to Texas in the SEC Tournament championship with the Longhorns up 23-19 — backs against the wall, adversity staring Skinner’s group right in the face.

The legendary volleyball head coach admitted that more often than not, you’re screwed in that spot, for lack of a better term.

“I think you win that match probably less than five percent of the time. I mean, you’re pretty much cooked,” he joked.

How do they claw themselves out of those moments, both specifically against Texas but in general under Skinner, to maintain the program’s standard of excellence?

“You really have your foundational pieces of effort to commit to defense and communication and all the standards that we live up to each and every day,” he responded. “To be honest with you, even in that match, we were living up to all those standards. There wasn’t anything I felt like we were not doing. We weren’t necessarily executing great, but we weren’t letting the standard down. I preach to our players, ever since they’ve been here, we have to be very mindful, you’ve got to be very present. You have to learn how to be present. You’ve got to learn how to know that each and every point has the same value, whether it’s point number one or point 25.”

That’s the answer to everything, in his opinion. Respect the now as much as anything that has happened or could happen.

“We really try and stay calm but focused and intense at the same time. … I may cuss on the air here, but if you have one foot in the past and one foot in the future, either thinking about how bad we’re down before, or thinking about if we lose, then you’re pissing on the present,” Skinner continued. “We’ve talked about that over and over again. … You know how it is, Coach, there’s no magical thing you can say in those moments. It’s just, are we conditioned to be really good right now? What is important now?

“Our team is highly competitive, don’t get me wrong. They want to run through a wall, they want to steal everything from the opponent as best as anybody else, but they’ve done a really good job at having some competitive maturity to be present in those moments.”

Those are the reasons Kentucky is two wins away from a second national championship in volleyball. Can Pope turn that advice into a championship push for No. 9 in basketball? It seems like a tall task right now sitting at 7-4, but hey, that’s what staying in the moment is for, right? No looking in the past, no looking in the future.

Just beat St. John’s and then worry about what’s next.