CoachCal.com: Meet Mychal Mulder
Mychal Mulder is a little bit of this and a little bit of that.
He is a newcomer, and yet he is a leader. He’s humble, but he’s eager to show what he can do. He went to a junior college because he didn’t have much exposure coming out of high school. Now he’s playing at the winningest basketball program in the country.
To say Mulder’s path to Lexington has been different would be an understatement. The 6-foot-4 wing from Windsor, Ontario, is just the third junior-college commitment in the last seven years under Kentucky head coach John Calipari, and he is chomping at the bit to play at Rupp Arena in front of 24,000 fans for the first time.
“It’s amazing to me that he would – such a great coach, such a great program – give me such an opportunity,” Mulder said. “Not all schools are willing to go look at JUCO at all. When I had Coach Cal reach out to me, it was real special to me. I didn’t ever expect it to go that far. I kind of thought going to JUCO I was going to play NCAA. I was determined. But I kind of thought I had a ceiling. But then Coach Cal reached out to me, I’m standing outside, and I’m like, there is no ceiling.”
Mulder, a junior who transferred from Vincennes University, a junior college in Vincennes, Ind., packs a reputation as a sharpshooter, having hit better than 46 percent from deep as a sophomore. Talk to him for five minutes and it’s easy to see he will be much more than that for another young Wildcats squad.
A leader by example, Mulder believes one of his roles on the team is to be the guy who is always giving his all.
“Fans can expect to see a kid who works hard and someone who they know they can trust that by the end of the game he’s still going 100 percent,” Mulder said. “They’re not going to see any laziness or attitude, ego or nothing like that. Coming from where I came from it’s not like I was really rubbed out a whole lot. It’s all about working hard, and I feel like that’s what they want to see from me, so that’s what they’ll get.”
