Will Stein‘s play-calling mantra is simple: Feed the Studs. It only works if you have studs. Kentucky must acquire talent to be competitive. It starts in the upcoming transfer portal, but there are long-term deficits that must be remedied by high school recruiting. Stein is building a staff that has cut its teeth on the trail.

One of the first things we learned about Joe Price, the new Kentucky wide receivers coach, is that he is known in the Lone Star State as East Side Joe. That is a reference to his hometown of Houston, a talent hotbed in the state of Texas. Safeties coach Josh Christian-Young just spent a couple of years at Houston after four years in New Orleans at Tulane.

New offensive line coach Cutter Leftwich first called Denton, Texas, home. He played college football in Louisiana at McNeese State, and spent time coaching at UTSA and North Texas. Kentucky’s two new coordinators each cultivated reputations as excellent recruiters and are coming to Lexington via the state of Texas and Louisiana.

Are you picking up the geographical theme yet?

Texas and Louisiana produce some of the most talented football players in America, not only in terms of quality, but quantity. In the 2025 On300 rankings, Texas led the way with 42 players, while Louisiana contributed a dozen, tied for the sixth-most. The issue is that Kentucky hasn’t gotten a lot of those players over the years. Might a tide finally be turning?

Sloan has Adaptable Recruiting Pitch

Within his first 24 hours on the job, Joe Sloan flipped four-star wide receiver Kenny Darby from LSU to Kentucky. Sloan’s connections in the state of Louisiana quickly paid dividends. He cultivated those connections for more than a decade in the Boot, but those weren’t always there for the former East Carolina quarterback from Virginia.

“I was 26 years old when Skip Holtz hired me at Louisiana Tech, and I had never been to Louisiana. He said, ‘Hey, what do you think about recruiting Baton Rouge?’ I said, ‘All right, that sounds good to me,’” Sloan recalled on Wednesday.

“He gave me, it was really nice a Crown Vic. The first one, it was a light baby blue. The second one was red, cherry red. It was nice; rolled down there and we started just developing relationships.”

You can expect Stein’s staff to lean on prior relationships to bring players to Kentucky. Jay Bateman has plenty of those in the DMV, the same region where the Wildcats recruited Josh Paschal. However, Kentucky can’t just rely on Texas, Louisiana, and the DMV to build a roster. Sloan believes this staff has the tools to adapt and find the best players from near and far to suit up in Kentucky blue.

“Recruiting it’s a people business. Coaches, mentors, and family members, they want to know that you have a plan for their son, on and off the field, to develop them to their fullest potential. What I look forward to is the opportunity to develop relationships right in all the areas that we’re going to recruit. I think that’s what it’s going to be,” said Sloan.

“That’s what it’s about, having open doors, answering the phone, creating relationships, and developing a trust with the people around the players that we’re going to recruit, that we’re going to take care of those young men. That’s what I’m going to do, that’s what I’ll continue to do, and that’s what we’ll do here at Kentucky as an entire program. So in terms of, I don’t know that it’s just one area, it’s more about the ability to develop those relationships and the excitement to do that, and I’m fired up.”

No. 1 Kentucky outlasted No. 3 Wisconsin 3-2 in the five-set thriller to earn a trip the the NCAA national championship. The Wildcats clinch their first national final appearance since winning the title in the Spring of 2021 and second in program history. 

In front of a sold-out T-Mobile Center in Kansas City, MO., Big Blue rallied in a dramatic fashion after a devastating 25-12 loss in Set 1. Kentucky was able to punch back in Set 2, earning the 25-22 victory before dropping the next set 25-21 to the Badgers. 

With their backs against the wall, the Cats fought off a rallying Wisconsin team for the 26-24 Set 4 victory to push the match to five. 

With momentum on their side, Kentucky took back what it lost in the first and fired on all cylinders in the fifth. The Cats raced out to a 6-1 lead early in the fifth before clinching the 15-13 win, hitting a match-best .409. 

Outside Eva Hudson powered 29 kills on .455 hitting with seven digs, two blocks and a service ace to power the Kentucky winm while Brooklyn DeLeye tallied 15. The Big Blue defense made the difference, registering eight big-time blocks against a career-night by Wisconsin’s Mimi Colyer. 

With the Wildcat win, Kentucky clinches a spot in the national championship to face No. 3 Texas A&M for the first ever all-SEC final in NCAA women’s volleyball history. 

KENTUCKY TO THE NATIONAL CHAMPIONSHIP AFTER A FIVE-SET THRILLER 😱#NCAAWVB x 🎥 ESPN / @KentuckyVB pic.twitter.com/RJNIv2eumg

— NCAA Women’s Volleyball (@NCAAVolleyball) December 19, 2025

Final stats here. 

Last December, the Kentucky Supreme Court upheld a law by a slim 4-3 majority that limited the power of the Jefferson County Board of Education and delegated more authority to the district’s superintendent.

Almost exactly one year later, the state’s high court has just done the opposite.

In a 4-3 ruling Thursday, the justices struck down the 2022 law, saying it violated the constitution by targeting one specific school district.

The court’s new opinion on the law is because of its change in membership since last December, as newly elected Justice Pamela Goodwine was sworn in a month later, and then joined three other justices in granting the school board’s request to rehear the case in April.

Replacing a chief justice who had voted to uphold the law last year, Goodwine sided with the majority in the opinion written by Justice Angela McCormick Bisig on Thursday to strike it down.

Bisig wrote that treating the Jefferson County district differently from all other public school districts in the state violated Sections 59 and 60 of the Kentucky Constitution. She noted that while the court “should and does give great deference to the propriety of duly enacted statutes,” they are also “duty bound to ensure that legislative decisions stay within the important mandates” of the constitution.

“When, as here, that legislative aim is focused on one and only one county without any articulable reasonable basis, the enactment violates Sections 59 and 60 of our Constitution,” Bisig wrote. “Reformulating the balance of power between one county’s school board and superintendent to the exclusion of all others without any reasonable basis fails the very tests established in our constitutional jurisprudence to discern constitutional infirmity.”

The at-times blistering dissenting opinion of Justice Shea Nickell — who wrote the majority opinion last year — argued the petition for a rehearing was improvidently granted in April, as it “failed to satisfy our Court’s historic legal standard for granting such requests, and nothing changed other than the Court’s composition.”

Nickell wrote that the court disregarded procedural rules and standards, “thereby reasonably damaging perceptions of judicial independence and diminishing public trust in the court system’s fair and impartial administration of justice.”

“I am profoundly disturbed by the damage and mischief such a brazen manipulation of the rehearing standard will inflict on the stability and integrity of our judicial decision-making process in the future.”

He added that some may excuse the majority’s decision by saying that “elections have consequences,” but that unlike legislators and executive officers being accountable to voters, “judges and justices are ultimately accountable to the law.”

“Courts must be free of political machinations and any fortuitous change in the composition of an appellate court’s justices should have no impact upon previously rendered fair and impartial judicial pronouncements,” Nickell wrote.

Kentucky Attorney General Russell Coleman, whose office defended the law before the court, criticized the new ruling voiding the law.

“I am stunned that our Supreme Court reversed itself based only on a new justice joining the Court,” Coleman said. “This decision is devastating for JCPS students and leaves them trapped in a failing system while sabotaging the General Assembly’s rescue mission.”

Corrie Shull, chair of the Jefferson County Board of Education, said in a statement he is grateful for the court’s new ruling affirming “that JCPS voters and taxpayers should have the same voice in their local operations that other Kentuckians do, through their elected school board members.”

Spokespersons for the Republican majority leadership of the Kentucky House and Senate did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Thursday’s ruling.

Republican House Speaker David Osborne criticized the move to rehear the case in April, calling it “troubling.”

“Unfortunately, judicial outcomes seem increasingly driven by partisan politics,” Osborne stated. “Kentuckians would be better served to keep politics out of the court, and the court out of politics.”

In August, GOP state Rep. Jason Nemes of Middletown penned an op-ed warning that any ruling overturning the 2022 law could draw a lawsuit challenging the Louisville-Jefferson County merger of 2003 as a violation of the same sections of Kentucky Constitution. That same day, Louisville real estate developer and major GOP donor David Nicklies filed a lawsuit seeking just that.

Some Republicans have also criticized Goodwine for not recusing herself from the case, alleging she had a conflict of interest due to an independent political action committee heavily funded by the teachers’ union in Louisville spending hundreds of thousands of dollars on ads to help elect her last year.

Louisville attorney and GOP official Jack Richardson filed a petition with the clerk of the Kentucky House in October to impeach Goodwine for not recusing herself. Goodwine said through a spokesperson at the time that it would not be appropriate for her to comment about the impeachment petition.