Wake Forest Athletics
100% Cotten
5/17/2010 12:00:00 AM | Men's Basketball
May 17, 2010
by Stan Cotten
New men's assistant basketball coach Mark Pope would have stood out as a physician. I mean, how many doctors are pushing seven feet tall? Not many. But Pope was on that track and in his third year of medical school at New York's prestigious Columbia University before having a change of heart.
One that now has led him to Wake Forest.
Pope admits that swapping his scrubs for a whistle is as close to a 180 as one can get.
"It's a huge change," Pope told me. "I spent my whole life playing basketball and was excited about pursuing something different - got there - and did an about face. It's a big change, but I feel I'm back home."
The former Kentucky star and veteran of seven NBA seasons says it was his passion for the game that drew him away from a future in medicine and back to basketball.
"I love this game," Pope admits. "I love the locker room, and I'm learning to really love the dynamics of a staff. I love being passionate and loud and emotional and fighting and chasing a dream. I've learned over the last year that I really love working with kids to see if you can tweak them and help them be less self-destructive and more able to unleash the potential that they have. To me that's an exciting process."
Pope's raw emotion for the game that has meant so much to him should prove to be an asset as he now recruits high school stars and tries to convince them to be Demon Deacons. He already has two things that just about all recruits at this level want: a national title (Kentucky) and a pro career.
And listening to him tell the story of his first trip to campus, he might just have the clincher.
"I had never set foot on campus before the day I drove up here from Georgia," Pope explains. "The first impression was -- I couldn't believe it. You're on the Wake Forest campus or you're off the Wake Forest campus - not like campuses I'd been on before. And when you're on -- you know it because it feels like a different place. It's beautiful and you can tell that it's a very tight community where everybody on this campus feels like this is somewhere really special. And that's unique. You're going to come on campus, and you're going to feel you're somewhere different than you've ever been before. You can't be on this campus and not feel like you're somewhere special."
Pope's take on Wake's address sounds a little like head coach Jeff Bzdelik's description of the Winston-Salem campus, no doubt part of Bzdelik's recruitment of Pope as the Deacs' new coach tried to lure his former player (Denver Nuggets) to his staff. Regardless, Bzdelik has had great influence on his now assistant coach.
"He had actually been a huge part of me making this career change," says Pope. "Needless to say when he called I was ecstatic to have a chance to be at Wake Forest and in the ACC. This is an unbelievable opportunity. I know he's ecstatic, and I am too."
And so works begins at Wake Forest for the man who would have been Dr. Pope except for his love of basketball. Now it's Coach Pope.
"It's in me. It's what I was born to do."
The doctor is in.
