He left the Bahamas as a teenager. He’s now ‘a star in the making’ with UK basketball
Show up early to Rupp Arena on Kentucky basketball game days, and there he’ll be out on the court, dressed in UK warmups and whipping passes to the Wildcats well before tipoff.
Train your eyes on the Kentucky bench during the game itself, and it won’t take long to spot him. There’s often a notebook in one hand, a pen in the other, and an infectious energy just waiting to pop.
And when those moments come, Mikhail McLean’s presence is unmistakable. The 33-year-old UK assistant coach — a former college basketball player himself — can be as exuberant as anyone on that sideline, cheering on the Cats and asking the crowd for more noise, a smile on his face bright enough to light the building.
“He’s like that all the time,” said UK’s starting center, Amari Williams, who flashed a wide grin at the mention of McLean’s name and a question about the energy the young assistant brings to whatever it is he happens to be doing. “That’s exactly how he is — diving on loose balls when he’s playing and everything. He’s a great guy, for sure.”
Go behind the scenes of Kentucky basketball this season, and you’ll see that, too.
McLean, who played his college ball at Houston and is still in good enough shape to hang with the Cats, won’t hesitate to get out on the court himself.
“He’ll hop on the scout (team),” said backup center Brandon Garrison. “If he feels like we’re cooking the scout team, he’ll hop in there, foul us, get loose balls, score, talk trash — doing little things that help the team out.”
Williams, a 7-footer from England who played his first four seasons at Drexel University before emerging into one of the SEC’s most feared big men — and arguably UK’s most important player — thanks McLean for guiding him along that path.
“He’s just helped me with everything,” he said. “Finishing, being tough with the ball, and rebounding. I feel like, every game, there’s something we have to emphasize on as bigs. He’s come out and helps us in practice. You know, he played for Houston, so he’s a tough big. So once we go against him and practice — me and BG coming out against some of these bigs — it’s nothing to us. So just him doing that every day is a blessing for us.”
Garrison, a sophomore and one of the youngest players on Mark Pope’s first UK team — a 6-11 forward with NBA potential but a ways to go before he reaches it — was drawn to McLean as soon as he arrived in Lexington. The two stay after practice to put up shots together. The young coach checks in daily on the younger player.
“I look up to him as, like, my mentor,” Garrison said. “It’s just not about basketball with him. And we started that from the summer, since day one, since I got here. … I just feel like he’s been helping me a lot this year, and I’m glad I’ve got an adult in my life like that — that can just guide me.”
Williams and Garrison had never met McLean this time last year. Neither had Pope, in fact. The new Kentucky coach had one spot left to fill on his first UK staff, which was already stocked with high-major head coaching experience, seasoned assistants who will soon be head coaches themselves and top-notch recruiters. The youngest among that group was already in his 40s.
For the fifth spot, Pope decided to go a little younger. And he ultimately went with a stranger. Such a scenario brings a level of uncertainty. It didn’t take Pope long to be certain of the bright future ahead of McLean on his basketball journey.
“Mikhail is going to be a star in this business. He’s going to be a star,” Pope said. “You talk about high ceilings. He’s got a really high ceiling. He’s meant so much to us. Clearly, you guys have seen it — especially through circumstance and injury — our 5s have had to carry a burden for our team, unlike any other 5s in the country this year. … And Coach McLean has been with those guys every step of the way, kind of mentoring and tutoring and teaching and growing them. He’s in daily film with those guys, analytical breakdowns, coaching them on the court, coaching them in the classroom and in their life. And he is a star in the making.
“He is going to be a head coach sooner than any of us would imagine. And he’s going to crush it. He comes from really good roots. He’s got great DNA. He’s worked with great coaches, and he’s been a real blessing to our entire staff and our entire team, but especially to Amari and BG, where he spends the bulk of his time.”
That’s coming from a guy who’s known McLean for less than a year. The person in college basketball who knows him best wouldn’t be surprised to hear those words.
Alvin Brooks — now the head coach of Lamar University — has been around McLean almost from the beginning. Over the past 15 years or so, he’s watched him blossom into this moment in time, the latest stop on an unlikely path that began in the Bahamas and seems destined to end with McLean running his own program someday, perhaps in the not too distant future.
“I’ve just seen him grow, from everything,” Brooks said. “From being a high school senior to a freshman college basketball player to an upperclassman. To transition to assistant of player development to assistant coach to husband to father. The whole nine. It’s been very, very cool to watch. But not at all surprising. Because he’s always been grounded. He’s always had a great work ethic. He’s always had great faith.
“And he’s always been a guy that you can depend on. Regardless of the circumstances, you can depend on Mikhail.”
From the Bahamas to college basketball
McLean was a soccer kid growing up in the Bahamas and didn’t take up basketball until he was 13 years old. He grew about 10 inches in a year — from 5-6 to 6-4, he said — and turned to basketball full time, ultimately leaving his home country at age 14 to pursue the game.
Frank Rutherford, an Olympic track and field athlete from the Bahamas, competed at the University of Houston and had a program that brought promising Bahamian athletes to the United States to further their academic and athletic goals.
McLean had already been in the Houston area for a while, as part of that program, by the time Brooks crossed paths with him. Following the 2008-09 college season, Brooks, who had spent the previous two years as director of basketball operations at Kentucky under Billy Gillispie, was looking for work and back in Houston, where he had been the head coach of the Cougars in the 1990s.
He linked up with legendary, Texas-based basketball figure John Lucas, and that ultimately led him to work with some of Rutherford’s kids. He was observing a session one Sunday, when a particular youngster stood out.
“I walk in, and I see this young guy that’s kind of like running the workout for all of the guys. But he’s, like, one of them,” Brooks said.
“Who is that guy?” he asked someone standing nearby.
“That’s Mikhail,” came the reply.
Brooks discovered that McLean, who had moved from the Bahamas to Texas completely on his own, lived in a house with several other kids from the country, and he was the de facto leader. He made sure everyone got to school on time. He sorted out individual schedules. He kept things running.
“Mikhail doesn’t ever talk about that,” Brooks said. “But, for me, that was one of the most impressive things about him. He was maybe the same age as some of them — maybe one or two years older than the others — but he was the guy they all looked up to. And he was the leader. And he was very responsible. And that’s hard to do as a teenager, away from home.
“This dude, at 14, had to figure out how to live in the United States. And he had to figure out how to take care of himself. And here he is two years later, and he’s doing the same thing for his countrymen. And doing it in a very responsible way. That is the kind of leader — and that is the kind of person — that you want.”
He wasn’t bad on the court either.
Brooks found out where McLean was attending high school and kept an eye on him. Not long after that, he got a job at Houston under new head coach James Dickey — coincidentally, another former Kentucky assistant — and he joined the staff with a recruit in mind.
When it came time to fill out the roster, Brooks told Dickey about McLean’s backstory and relayed what he had observed and heard of his time in the United States so far.
“He’s a good athlete. He’s a good basketball player,” he said. “But there’s way more to him than that.”
Learning under Kelvin Sampson
McLean didn’t go on to be a star during his playing career with the Cougars. He scored 245 points in 101 games over five seasons. He was limited to only five games as a sophomore due to a broken foot and battled injuries throughout his time in college.
But on and off the court, McLean was exactly who Brooks thought he would be.
Listed at 6-8 and 205 pounds, McLean wasn’t the biggest or most talented player on the team, but his energy stood out. He battled for rebounds. He brought intensity on defense.
When Dickey stepped down as head coach at the end of the 2013-14 season, the Cougars hired Kelvin Sampson — who had a Final Four on his résumé but had spent the previous six seasons as an NBA assistant — as his replacement.
Many of Houston’s players transferred or graduated.
“And I’d been in the NBA, so I didn’t know any of the players,” Sampson said. “Didn’t know their names, any of that. But I focused on the kids that wanted to stay. And I didn’t know who Mikhail was. But the more I got to know Mikhail, the thing that stood out was his maturity. He was different. A very serious young man. He wanted to do things the right way. A learner.”
Brooks stuck around, too, in the role of assistant coach, and he told Sampson the same thing he had told Dickey four years earlier. Keep an eye on this kid. There’s something special about him. Sampson didn’t need the heads up.
The new head coach was introduced on April 3, 2014, and he met with his remaining holdover players right before that first press conference. McLean was struck by Sampson’s vision for the program then. He ultimately turned the Cougars into a Final Four program, perennially one of the top teams in college basketball, and the foundation was set during that very first season.
Before camp started, Sampson met with McLean and two other players. The coach told them they were going to be in the gym with him every day before practice, starting at 6 a.m.
“And some coaches say that, you know,” McLean said, with skepticism in his voice. “And I was like, ‘We’re gonna do this for like a day or two, and it’s gonna fizzle out.’ And he showed up there at 5:45, for two weeks straight — just me and two other guys, with no other coaches — and he shot with us.
“And what I learned — and I bring it into my development with players now — it wasn’t about us shooting. That was an extra 45 minutes he got to talk to us and connect with us. And we ended up being the three leaders of the team. I didn’t even know it. Because I was like, ‘I’m not gonna be shooting all these jumpers. Why does he want to shoot with me?’ But he got to connect with us. … It’s not even really about getting in the gym and getting to work. Sometimes it’s just the conversations you get to have.”
Foot surgery caused McLean to miss the start of that season. He suffered a broken foot again during an early February practice. That injury ended his college basketball career.
At that point, Houston’s roster was depleted. “We were starting a 4 man at point guard,” Sampson said. “That was the situation.”
As soon as he was done with surgery, McLean was back in the gym to be around the team for the final weeks of the season. He attended practice every day. He asked good questions.
McLean had already graduated from the university with a degree in public health education and started work on his master’s in that same field, and the advanced degree was something that Sampson and the Houston coaches knew was important to him. So they offered him a graduate assistant position for the following season. McLean would get to complete his studies. And Houston’s younger players would get more time with McLean.
He says now that he had no intention of pursuing a career in coaching at that time. He didn’t know exactly what he wanted to do, but he didn’t think basketball would be part of his long-term goals.
Brooks and Sampson — the two biggest influences on McLean’s college life at that point — saw that future well before he did.
“Yes. Yes,” Sampson repeated, with no hesitation. “Those kids that come from outside the continental United States — like Mikhail came from the Bahamas — you don’t know what you don’t know with those kids. You don’t know the sacrifices they’ve made.
“I remember meeting Mikhail’s mother. And Mikhail left home and moved to the United States and had to put his trust in other people to help him. That’s tough for a parent to see their son or daughter go to an unpredictable environment. And so Mikhail is used to handling adversity. You know, the reason he wasn’t quite sure is because he was smart enough to do about anything.”
Becoming an assistant coach
McLean’s duties at Houston — first as a grad assistant, then in a player development role — included just about everything. On-court work with the Cougars, off-court mentoring, academic and compliance oversight, scouting reports and countless other tasks — some big, some small.
About three months into his GA stint, he started to realize he wanted to be a coach.
Sampson connected McLean with Galen Robinson Jr. — a promising but still-growing freshman on that season’s team — and told the young grad assistant that he wanted him to be a mentor to the teenager.
“And this kid was an unbelievable talent,” McLean said. “But he struggled with a lot of stuff off the court that I didn’t know about, a lot of people didn’t know about. And just getting to connect with him, learn his story, and get to kind of help him push through some stuff he was struggling with. Just the connection with the kids and helping them kind of get over those hurdles, I was like, ‘Man, I want to do this.’
“Because I’ve always wanted to impact lives. I wanted to be a doctor. I studied pre-med my first couple years of college. Couldn’t do both — basketball and that. And just getting to impact his life and a lot of other people’s lives, I thought, ‘This is my calling.’”
Sampson has a structure in place at Houston that includes linking up his grad assistants with an assistant coach. He placed McLean with his own son, Kellen, who is now the head coach in waiting for the Cougars and viewed as one of the top assistants in the country.
As McLean spent more and more time around the staff, he earned more responsibilities.
“And he just kind of grew from there,” Brooks said. “And then he became a student of the game from a coaching perspective. And then he started learning how to run individual workouts. He learned how to do scouting reports and do everything. Every year, he got a little bit better. And as he got better, I thought, ‘Well, man, if I get a job, I’m taking this dude with me.’”
In 2021, the Cougars made the Final Four, and Brooks landed the head coaching job at Lamar.
Houston’s team was in Indianapolis preparing for the national semifinals when Brooks called McLean into his hotel room and offered the 29-year-old a job as an assistant coach. He accepted on the spot.
Brooks took over a Lamar team that had finished 10-18 the previous season and would be starting from scratch. Those first few weeks on the job consisted of he and McLean driving all over Texas, evaluating and recruiting players, making plans to build a roster and lay a winning foundation for a program.
“He never shied away from the work,” Brooks said. “He’s a glass half full kind of guy. He’s a positive guy, hardworking. So we’re in a good position right now, in large part because he did a really good job helping us get here.”
Lamar went 2-27 that first season, struggling throughout with players sidelined due to illness and the typical growing pains that come with rebuilding a program. The Cardinals won nine games the next year and went 19-12 — making the conference tournament semifinals — the year after that.
They finished in second place in the Southland Conference this season, and they’ll hit the court in a few days with a realistic chance of making the NCAA Tournament for just the third time in 40 years. Brooks said that even though McLean isn’t there now, he had a lot to do with it.
Around the same time, McLean helped another team reach unforeseen heights.
Connecting with ‘Bahamian pride’
The first favor he asked of Brooks upon accepting the position at Lamar was to be able to help coach the Bahamas national team in the summer. It had been a dream of his for years, but one he couldn’t manage while working the less-flexible schedule at Houston.
Brooks agreed, and McLean joined his home country’s national team as an assistant coach.
“I just felt as though that I had so much to give to it,” he said.
When he moved to the United States at age 14, the rest of his family stayed back in the Bahamas, and — though he lived in Houston — he still felt a “Bahamian pride” that had only been strengthened by his time away from home.
His opportunity to live that dream also coincided with a series of devastating times off the court.
McLean’s mother died during Houston’s Final Four season. His father died during his first year at Lamar, and his grandmother died the year after that.
“So just always being able to give back to a country that’s done so much for me,” McLean said of returning home. “I go back every year and I’m just able to pour into them. So it was a really, really big deal to do that.”
McLean was late getting established in Lexington last summer, because Pope also allowed him time away from the program to help guide the Bahamas national team. That squad eventually advanced further than any in the country’s history, coming up one game short — an eight-point loss to Spain in the finals of the Olympic Trials — of making the Paris Olympics.
The ultimate result ended up one victory shy of the desired destination, but last year’s run was surely a cathartic experience for McLean, who had to deal with so much sorrow in such a short amount of time at a relatively young age.
“Mikhail has tremendous faith,” Brooks said. “He’s always had that. He’s always been a guy that you knew was going to persevere, and so he just continued to do that. His mother was a wonderful, wonderful lady. If you’re looking at Mikhail, he’s a spitting image of his mother. Always had a smile, just like Mikhail. …
“I’ve watched him go through all of that. He stayed the course.”
By the time this college basketball season began, McLean was settled in Lexington and — for the first time in 15 years — Brooks found himself in a gym without the energetic young man he’d grown so accustomed to being around.
The 65-year-old head coach chuckled at the thought of those first practices at Lamar, back when the roster was depleted, the outlook was dire and McLean often had to jump onto the court himself to keep things on track.
“And our best practices were when he was in there on defense,” Brooks said. “It wasn’t his ability. It was just the energy. And the competitiveness. And, man, he would get guys going, boy! He would get guys going. He is the hype man. And when he left, I said, ‘Well, OK, somebody’s gotta be the hype man in these practices some days.’
“He wasn’t crazy with it. He was strategic and knew when to kind of tone it down, knew when to challenge guys. But he does a good job of keeping guys competitive and keeping them loose. There’s a lot of things that he brings to the table.”
Mikhail McLean meets Mark Pope
The first few weeks of the Pope era at Kentucky were a mad dash to piece together a staff, fill out a roster and get the lay of the land in Lexington, a place where the new head coach obviously spent his college years but one he hadn’t known up close for nearly 30 years.
Pope’s first four assistant coaching hires — Alvin Brooks III, Mark Fox, Cody Fueger and Jason Hart — came together relatively quickly, all in place within a couple of weeks of Pope’s arrival.
The fifth spot lingered, to the point that observers wondered if it would even be filled at all.
“Coach Pope was looking for someone younger, I think, with energy, that can kind of offer something different. And I felt as though I checked the box,” McLean said. “So I just kind of — I don’t want to say I applied — but I reached out and sent a couple projects and went back and forth, back and forth, and then we finally got on the phone a couple of times. We kind of hit it off pretty well, but it dragged out for about two or three weeks. So it wasn’t a thing where it was like, ‘Yeah, come on.’ So there was a lot of anxiety there.”
McLean’s addition to the staff wasn’t announced until June, nearly two months after the other four assistants officially joined Kentucky’s program.
Even with all of the UK ties, McLean had never met Pope before this time. He knew Alvin Brooks III — the son of the Lamar head coach — but had never worked with him. Obviously, the fifth spot on Pope’s staff was a coveted one around college basketball.
Brooks didn’t want to lose McLean at Lamar, but he knew he couldn’t keep him around forever either. He knew it would be a good opportunity, and he thought his young assistant was ready. So, he called Pope up himself. Brooks told the UK coach all the things McLean could do to help his program and make Pope’s life easier.
“He is who he appears to be. He comes every day to work. … He is good enough to help you win there,” he said. “There ain’t no question he could help you. The question will be, ‘How long can you keep him?’”
After that conversation, Pope sought out Sampson, who he’d coached against in the Big 12 that season. Sampson had also pursued Pope out of high school as the head coach at Washington State in the 1990s, and the Kentucky coach obviously trusted his opinion.
“When Mark called me about Mikhail, it didn’t surprise me,” Sampson said. “That’s Mikhail. Once he got the grad assistant opportunity here — for him, it put him on a track to where he is now. This won’t be his last job either. I don’t know if he’ll continue his career in Kentucky, but he’ll have an opportunity to go somewhere else and be a top assistant. And, eventually, he’ll become a head coach in college.”
When these seasoned college basketball veterans talk about McLean’s future as a head coach, it’s not if, but when. They all know, firsthand, how difficult it is to obtain such jobs. None of them have any question that McLean will get his shot, perhaps someday soon.
McLean doesn’t try to hide that ambition.
“On my vision board — I look at it every day — 38 was the goal. To be a head coach by 38,” he said. “But I’m 33 now. I think within the next three years, I should be there. But I’m focused on just one day at a time here. And just taking this as far as we can. I’ve never been someone that’s run to the next job. I’ve turned down a lot of job opportunities every year. I mean, I was at Houston for six years. I was at Lamar for three years. I could have left after the first or second year. So just being present, and just making sure I’m at the best possible place for the team — just doing my part, for sure.”
McLean has enjoyed his time in Lexington. His wife, Arrion, is from Texas, but she has family in the Dayton, Ohio, area and lived in Cincinnati for a few years as a kid. Their three young sons, MJ — the oldest, at 6 — Amari and Kai, adapted well to the move.
He and Pope also seem to have clicked.
“He is extremely deliberate in his approach to teaching. He knows exactly what he wants,” McLean said of his new boss. “He’s extremely analytical. And I’m extremely analytical, too. I think that’s actually kind of where we hit it off the most, because I like to think the game from a numbers standpoint, and he does, too.”
His first boss, Sampson — a man who’s not prone to hyperbole or false praise — said he had “no doubt” that McLean would become a college head coach, if that’s what he wants to do.
“Mikhail will go as far as he chooses to go, because he’s that kind of guy,” he said. “I’m very proud of Mikhail, because I saw him when nobody knew him. When he was just a little skinny kid from the Bahamas, trying to not break his feet.”
And for Brooks, who’s known McLean even longer, this Kentucky basketball season has been an absolute joy. He’s obviously busy with his own team, but he’s been paying attention to the Wildcats, too, tuning in and seeing his son and his protege together on the UK sideline.
Brooks spoke from personal experience when he told McLean to expect the best that college basketball has to offer at Kentucky. And he spoke from personal experience when he advised Pope to take a leap of faith on a young assistant he’d never met.
“When you don’t know guys, you don’t know how it’s gonna go. But Mikhail is one of those types of guys — he doesn’t have that ego to him. He’s gonna do whatever needs to be done,” Brooks said. “He’s just a winner. And winners adapt. They do what needs to be done. And that’s what Mikhail is. He is a tremendous winner with character.
“I’m a little biased, you know, but I am biased based on facts. Based on what he’s actually done. He’s been a part of a lot of winning, man. He’s been a part of a lot of rebuilds. And then you look at his life, though, and it’s no great wonder. I mean, there aren’t a lot of guys that moved to a different country at 14. By themselves. He didn’t come over here with any brothers or sisters or his mother or father. But you’ve got to really thank them for giving him the opportunity to come over here and trust him like that.”
This story was originally published March 6, 2025 at 6:00 AM with the headline "He left the Bahamas as a teenager. He’s now ‘a star in the making’ with UK basketball."
