Senior Hood taking leadership role in coming UK basketball season
October 3, 2013
By Nick Gray | Sports Editor
UK senior forward Jon Hood has done almost as much as a college basketball player can do at UK. He has won an NCAA National Championship games, has been a part of three SEC Championships and has played in multiple NCAA Tournament games.
After the best season of his collegiate career thus far, Hood has his eyes on the horizon.
Though he posted career highs in points, rebounds, assists and minutes per game in 2012-13, Hood said he is not pleased with the Cats’ performance and refuses to see those results repeated.
“Nobody on this team wants to feel the way we felt last year,” Hood said. “We felt disappointment, upset, ticked off a little bit. Nobody wants to do that again. We won’t. I will refuse to go do that again. It was one of the worst parts of my life.”
When Hood opened up about his play last season, he said his confidence increased throughout the year.
“I was relaxed. I had more fun. Once I did that, I started playing better. You have fun, but there are those things that get you down on yourself. Nobody wants that, ever,” Hood said. “When you’re playing and stuff is not going right and you think you’re getting yanked (off the court) for something, you have to go through and say ‘Alright, if I mess up, I mess up. But I’m going to go 100 miles per hour and have fun with it.’”
In his fifth year at UK, the 6-foot-7, 215-pound forward finds himself again battling for playing time with highly-recruited talent such as freshman guard James Young and returning sophomore forward Alex Poythress.
“Right now, we’re not playing. At this point, we are at the same level until one of the three of us cranks it up,” Hood said. “As athletes, we love competition.”
Hood is one of four players who played at least 23 games last season, and several freshmen, including guard Dominque Hawkins and forwards Marcus Lee and Derek Willis, have mentioned Hood as one of the budding leaders on the roster.
Hood and guard Jarrod Polson are the only seniors on the team.
Hood started at UK in the fall of 2009 as a part of the first recruiting class in head coach John Calipari’s tenure in Lexington.
That 2009 recruiting class featured four first round picks in the 2010 NBA Draft (John Wall, DeMarcus Cousins, Eric Bledsoe and Daniel Orton).
Hood played in 17 games in his freshman season, averaging 4.4 minutes per game. His playing time increased to 4.8 minutes per game in 33 games in the 2010-11 season, including action in three NCAA Tournament games.
A torn ACL took away Hood’s 2011-12 season, as he watched the Cats win the NCAA National Championship from the sidelines.
Now, two years later, teammates have already labeled the fifth-year senior, who graduated in May, as the old man on the team, with freshman center Dakari Johnson joking to the kids at Picadome Elementary on Monday during the CATS Back Pack program that Hood had “played with (Rajon) Rondo” and “played during the Rupp days.”
The veteran didn’t mention his age as he spoke about the upcoming season.
“I don’t care about 40-0,” Hood said. “I care about the first game. I want to be 1-0, 2-0, then we’ll see how it goes. We just want to take every game one at a time and have fun with it and be the best that we can be.”
