In one month, Kenny Brooks has already changed UK women’s basketball in two big ways

On Friday, Kenny Brooks will have served one full month as Kentucky Wildcats women’s basketball coach. In that month, Brooks has already fundamentally altered the paradigm for the UK women’s hoops program in two significant ways.

Since officially starting as Kentucky head coach on March 26, Brooks has completely flipped UK’s model for roster construction.

For a school that has struggled to recruit size for, literally, decades, Brooks — buoyed by his success helping the 6-foot-6 Elizabeth Kitley develop into an All-American at Virginia Tech — has added for next season post players who stand 6-foot-5 and 6-7.

That is only the start of Brooks adding length to the UK roster, too. Kentucky has also signed forwards who go 6-4 and 6-3 and wings who are 6-2 and 6-1.

The ability to recruit such height is a radical change for Kentucky. You have to go back nine seasons, to 2015-16, to find the last time UK had a player who stood 6-5 or taller on one of its rosters. That player, 6-6 Ivana Jakubcova, was a little-used, face-the-basket big who averaged 1.1 points and 1.1 rebounds for Kentucky that season.

It will be stunning if UK doesn’t get far more production from: 1.) 6-5 sophomore-to-be Clara Strack, who averaged 17.5 points and 7.5 rebounds while making 13 of 15 field goal attempts in two 2024 NCAA Tournament games for Virginia Tech while filling in for an injured Kitley; 2.) 6-7 freshman-to-be Clara Silva, a product of Portugal who is one of the most-coveted international prospects in the current high school recruiting class.

With such height and potential in the post, Kentucky in its first season under Brooks will look radically different than the frenetic, full-court pressing style Matthew Mitchell employed to make UK women’s basketball nationally relevant — three NCAA Tournament Elite Eights and five Sweet 16s from 2010 through 2016 — in the first part of the second decade of the 21st century.

“Obviously, we are going to have more size. We are going to try to surround them with some shooters so we can keep the floor spaced,” Brooks said of Kentucky’s new playing style on his debut radio show on the UK Sports Network on April 15. “We will play a little bit fast, but not typical, helter-skelter, up-and-down (tempo).

“We are going to be very opportunistic in our tempo and transition. If we can push the ball and get an easy opportunity, we will. But when you have low-post presence, you want to wait for the bigs to get down the court.”

The other major change Brooks has already implemented at Kentucky is, for UK, a new-found ability to succeed on the international recruiting market.

Of the nine players currently on the Wildcats 2024-25 roster, three are from outside the United States.

All-America point guard Georgia Amoore followed Brooks to Lexington from Virginia Tech. She will become the most-accomplished player to wear Kentucky blue and white since Rhyne Howard exited after the 2022 season.

Amoore is a product of Ballarat, Victoria, Australia. She will be joined at UK by incoming junior-college transfer Amelia Hassett, a 6-3 forward from Albury, New South Wales Australia, and Silva, a native of Faro, Portugal.

It is not as if Kentucky hasn’t had good players from outside the United States. Ex-UK star Evelyn Akhator, a native of Lagos, Nigeria, was the No. 3 overall pick in the 2017 WNBA draft, after all.

Previously, however, UK has not been as consistently able to attract top international prospects as it needed to be.

The ability to recruit internationally is vital in women’s college hoops. Simply put, there are not enough elite American players to go around — and the top, home-grown prospects have tended to congregate at the already-established programs.

One way to bridge that gap is to seek the top players from across the globe.

In this season’s NCAA Tournament, there were a combined seven international players on the rosters of the teams that reached the Final Four.

On his radio program, Brooks credited one of the assistant coaches who has accompanied him to Kentucky from Virginia Tech, Radvile Autukaite, with opening up the international recruiting market.

A former member of Lithuania’s national teams at various age levels, Autukaite “does a phenomenal job internationally,” Brooks said. “Look at our roster, you see sprinkles of international. She’s responsible for that.”

So, already, Brooks has built a UK roster in which 66.7% of the Wildcats players now stand 6-foot-1 or taller and 33.3% are from outside the United States.

It took the coach one month to create what seems very much a new day in Kentucky women’s basketball.

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