Matthew Mitchell has spent countless hours with his team over the last five months.An offseason of conditioning, individual workouts and practices is at its end, giving way to the start of the regular season.”It’s finally here and it’s time to play,” Mitchell said.But for all that eagerness, there’s also some anxiety. Mitchell might have seen all that preseason preparation leading up to Friday’s 7 p.m. season opener against Appalachian State in Memorial Coliseum, but he still doesn’t know exactly what to expect from the No. 11/10 Wildcats.”The biggest thing for me right now is I’m not quite sure what we’re going to see tomorrow and as a coach that’s a little scary,” Mitchell said. “And I’m talking about from our team. I’m not talking about our opponent.”UK Hoops has plenty of experience in the form of seniors Bria Goss, Jennifer O’Neill and Azia Bishop, but this is a new team. Gone are post stars DeNesha Stallworth and Samarie Walker, with three players – Kyvin Goodin-Rogers, Alexis Jennings and Alyssa Rice – who have never played a college game set to step in.Considering the makeup of his roster, Mitchell has set three simple goals for his team, and it’s nothing to do with Southeastern Conference standings or advancing in the NCAA Tournament. He wants UK to be the fastest team in the country, the most defensively disruptive and the toughest. From there, he’ll let the results play out.”They’re capable of it,” Mitchell said. “They’re already showing some great signs in all three areas, but that’s what I’d like for them to become.”UK showed more such good signs in its lone exhibition, a 141-63 win over Pikeville. The Cats were dynamic in the open floor, regularly getting out in transition in scoring what would have been a school-record number of points had the game counted. Though Mitchell praised the speed of players like O’Neill, Bishop and Janee Thompson, it wasn’t any of them handling the ball on their own that made UK’s pace what it was against Pikeville.”We don’t need to be a big dribbling team,” Mitchell said. “To be fast, we need to be a good passing team. The ball needs to move and I think one lesson we’ve tried to learn as we really broke down taking some steps forward this year, is sometimes when one player dominates the ball with the dribble, it actually slows us down.”UK was also disruptive in the exhibition, forcing 37 turnovers. The Cats also showed signs of toughness against Pikeville, taking charges and effectively transitioning into a half-court offensive game when necessary. However, it’s going to take some regular-season tests to truly judge this team.The Cats won’t have to wait long for a handful of those.Friday’s season opener begins a stretch of three games in six days to start the season, a matchup with No. 8/9 Baylor in the middle of it. Mitchell expects to use the results from those three games to identify strengths and weaknesses and tailor practices going forward.”We’ve constructed all the practices to be fast, tough and disruptive, so what are you doing well?” Mitchell said. “Sometimes you do things a little bit better than you give your team credit for as a coach. You’re a little too critical sometimes, maybe you haven’t worked on something that maybe you haven’t felt like was going to be really good and it’s not. The information we can gain will really, really help us as a team.”In many ways, Mitchell still sees his team as a blank canvas. Friday, he begins the work of trying to paint a masterpiece.”This team has so much room for growth it’s incredible,” Mitchell said. “I do know that about us right now: We’re going to get much, much better than we are right now. You just have too many young players who are thinking too much right now. And there’s no way around it. You have to teach it. You have to give them the information and so if we look like a million bucks this week, we’re going to look like $5 million at some time. If we look less than that, we’ll increase in value with this team.”