Mark Pope is pumping crowd noise into Kentucky practices ahead of No. 1 Purdue

Big Blue Nation is always great, but this point in the season is not usually the Kentucky fanbase at its best. No-name exhibition matchups are made for cheap tickets, maybe a chance for kids to sit closer to the action than usual, rooting for their beloved Wildcats in blowouts. Every seat isn’t always full, and of the ones that are, they’re not living and dying with every make and miss. Then the regular season is when the volume is turned up inside Rupp Arena.

That’s not the case Friday with No. 1 Purdue in town, a first-of-its-kind preseason battle between two top-10 teams and legitimate title contenders. The get-in price is $63 with the cheapest lower-level ticket going for $137 and the premium seats going for hundreds of dollars — $810 a pop for midcourt in section 31, row A, if you really wanna get crazy.

The people in that building really wanna be in that building, and the atmosphere is going to reflect that, exhibition or not. And the Wildcats will be prepared for the unique October 24 experience, one that’s going to feel like it’s April in Indianapolis.

Their idea? Artificial crowd noise at practice to create the big-game atmosphere Rupp Arena is guaranteed to see at 6 p.m. ET when the Cats and Boilermakers tip off.

“There are some things that make me smile, like the fact that I can’t get these guys to shut up,” Mark Pope said when previewing the matchup on Thursday. “It’s just incredible. We actually had a practice yesterday, with courtesy of Coach (Alvin) Brooks, who’s always — AB does an unbelievable job of looking at our program holistically. Sometimes we get lost in the weeds and he’s always taking this 30,000-foot view, so he just made a small tweak.

“He’s like, ‘Coach’ — because we’ve been talking about how much our guys communicate, like how relentless they are communicating — ‘the next step right now is, let’s get in the gym with a ton of crowd noise. Let’s make it feel like it’s really there.'”

The results were exactly as hoped, impacting a team that takes pride in its ability to communicate and forcing the players to work around those limitations. If you can’t hear your teammates, how do you adjust? Are there non-verbal workarounds? Is team chemistry good enough to overcome it?

That was the test before the first exhibition test, before the regular season tests.

“Sure enough, it had the impact on our team that it has on every team. It’s a little disorienting,” Pope said. “The first thing you do is you stop communicating quite as much because you think guys can’t hear you, but the trick is when you play the way we do, your mouth going is actually what makes your mind work. When you stop actually talking about everything aloud, you stop reading as quickly.

“So it’s been incredibly gratifying, one, to see our guys have absolute joy in communicating with each other. And it’s been another thing to see our coaches step up and be like, ‘Hey, let’s actually take this to the next level.'”

It wasn’t perfect, nor will it be perfect early in the season. That just takes time, learning the coaches and players in live competition opportunities. The hurdles now will lead to a real breakthrough later.

“It’s a skill,” Pope said. “And it’s a skill that we’ll continue to learn, but we took our first step. What’s nice is that as a player, you don’t even know you’re going to do that. You don’t even actually realize — it’s just, you hear all the noise in practice where it’s piped in and it’s annoying and distracting. You’re used to blowing the whistle and then having some quiet where just one coach is giving instruction or two players are having a conversation. You’re trying to do that, and you’re yelling, and it’s just annoying.

“In practice, it’s way more annoying than it is in the game, so we stopped practice twice to remind our guys, ‘Just because you feel like you can’t hear it because of noise — you talking, even if your teammate can’t hear it, it is such a key to how we play every single second of every day.’ It’s literally a skill that our guys learn and recognize and then can activate. That’s just a process.”

Overall, though, the returns are all positive. The communication is good and only improving, and the competition is as good as it gets. The guys get after it every second of practice between the first and final whistles.

Now it’s time to see how that translates to game reps — and against the No. 1 team in the country.

“I love our team’s communication right now, it’s going to be important for us all year long. I love their competitive spirit. I love practice. I love our practices so much because our guys make it fun. There’s not one guy on our team who disengages, they are just so hungry to win. Whatever it is we put in front of them, it makes practice just a joy. I’ve been really gratified by that.”