Five-star forward Tounde Yessoufou one of Mark Pope’s first recruiting targets for Kentucky
One of the early reservations that came with Kentucky’s hiring of Mark Pope as its next basketball coach was Pope’s lack of experience recruiting top-tier college basketball prospects. Part of that was born from the unique recruiting circumstances that accompanied Pope’s prior head coaching jobs at Utah Valley and BYU. And regardless, few college basketball programs have the kind of recruiting cachet or resources that Kentucky does, and Pope hadn’t been in a position to utilize those on the recruiting trail before. But Pope has quickly laid to rest any concerns about his
recruiting approach with the Wildcats. And it started with one prospect in particular. Last month brought the first major recruiting period for Pope and his coaching staff at Kentucky, as he, associate head coach Alvin Brooks III and assistant coaches Cody Fueger and Jason Hart fanned out across the country to watch prospects play. The biggest concentration of talent that May weekend was at the Nike Elite Youth Basketball League stop in Indiana, and five-star class of 2025 power forward Tounde Yessoufou quickly emerged as a focus of UK’s recruiting activity at that event.
Last week, the Kentucky staff rolled four deep into another major recruiting event — the NBPA Top 100 Camp at the ESPN Wide World of Sports Complex just outside of Orlando, Florida — to get eyes on some of the best high school recruits in the country. And that included another look at Yessoufou. The 6-foot-6, 215-pound power forward was a notable performer at the NBPA Top 100
Camp, posting the second-highest scoring average (23.1 points per game) of any camp participant. Yessoufou also averaged 8.1 rebounds and 1.6 steals, both of which ranked among the highest marks at the event and allowed Yessoufou to be named one of the camp’s all-star performers.
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