FAYETTEVILLE — Fresh out of Clarion University of Pennsylvania, John Calipari learned the most valuable lesson in what has become an illustrious career during his first stint as a college coach.
From 1982-85, he served as an associate assistant coach at Kansas under Ted Owens and, later, Larry Brown. A Basketball Hall of Fame inductee in 2002, Brown provided the nugget of wisdom that has stuck with Calipari across five decades.
“Larry Brown told me early in my career, ‘If you care about the kids — authentically care about the kids — you’ll always have a job because they’ll always want to play for you. And whatever you do, they’ll want to come to you, they’ll want to play [for you],’” Calipari said Wednesday night in his first press conference with reporters in Bud Walton Arena. “If you authentically care…the great thing about kids, they can smell it. They know you’re a fraud, they know it. And that’s what he taught me early. Do you add value?
“If you add value to young people, you’re always going to have a job. That means someone is going to say, ‘I want him to coach my guys.’ I’ve lived by the two things: good people and care. Care more than anybody else.”
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In the final moments of his on-stage Q&A with Arkansas radio play-by-play voice Chuck Barrett, Calipari told the estimated crowd of 7,000 fans in Bud Walton Arena what to expect from him in his tenure with the Razorbacks. He is always going to be a player’s coach.
Calipari then said, ‘I’m sorry.’ Odds are, he didn’t mean it.
“It’s about the players,” he added. “I know for some reason people think you can’t really be a coach that wants to win if you’re about the players. No, you can do both. Every decision I will make will be, ‘Is this the best decision for these guys?’ Not me, [not] as a staff. Is it the best decision for them?
“You saw my team [at Kentucky] this year. We played totally different. Why? It was the best way for that team to play. We couldn’t guard as well as we needed to, but we could really score. But it was how they had to play. All I can tell you is I won’t change that.”
Calipari added that he does not want to use a player on his roster to only “set screens and dive on the floor.” He aims for player improvement and development.
And his job is to prepare players for life after basketball, teach them how to create joy in their lives and “do something for somebody else.” Caring for players, he added, doesn’t equate to being soft.
“Come on, you’ve watched me coach,” Calipari said. “You ever been to one of my practices? I mean, they’re hard. I don’t swear and cuss and throw balls and punch; that’s not who I am. But the standard is really high.
“My job is to help them do stuff they didn’t think they could do, and then let them feel good about that. That’s what I try to do.”
In a video posted to Arkansas’ men’s basketball account on X shortly after the Calipari hire became official, multiple former Kentucky players – John Wall, De’Aaron Fox, Julius Randle — spoke highly of their college coach.
“Playing for Cal was…that relationship lasts forever,” Randle said.
“I love him. I still talk to Cal to this day,” Fox added. “You came in, you earned everything. He made you work.”
And Calipari said the greatest feedback he has ever received — from legendary coach Pat Riley — is that his players not only got to the NBA but were quality teammates from Day 1. Calipari demanded it.
“That’s what I want to have [as] the base of what we’re doing here, the culture of what we’re trying to do here,” Calipari said.