It took some help from a former player for Matthew Mitchell to realize he needed to make a change.Crystal Riley is in her second season on Mitchell’s staff after playing three years at Kentucky. All that time spent with the UK head coach led her to make an observation this week.”She just helped me out tremendously,” Mitchell said. “She said, ‘Coach I’ve never seen you work harder at trying to make people feel good about themselves and build them up and stuff.’ It just has not worked.”The advice came as Mitchell was searching for answers following a loss on Thursday to Alabama in which UK lacked fire and energy. He applied it immediately.”No more Mr. Nice Guy,” Mitchell said. “No more telling them how everything is going to be all right.”The practices that followed have been predictably intense. Every drill has a winner and the loser has to run, all in an effort to inject competitiveness back into the Wildcats. “I do think he was being a little light on us and trying to stay positive,” Janee Thompson said. “But his mentality now is better because it kind of lights a fire under us at times and it makes us play harder and that showed in the game today.”On Sunday, No. 9/8 UK (16-4, 4-3 Southeastern Conference) responded, taking down Arkansas (15-5, 2-5 SEC) in Memorial Coliseum, 68-58. “Well, we are happy to win a really hard fought game and I thought Arkansas really played hard and competed and we were finally able to find a group that would get in and compete in the second half,” Mitchell said.For the first few minutes after halftime, it appeared that wouldn’t happen.UK trailed 32-31 at the break and Arkansas went on a 12-3 run over the first 2:40 of the second half behind 5-of-5 shooting. Mitchell quickly called a timeout, forgoing the Mr. Nice Guy routine and spelling out exactly what needed to happen.There would be none of the wallowing in self-pity, none of the self-doubt that led to losses in three of UK’s last five games. In that moment, the Cats simply had to step up and they did. A 22-6 run gave the Cats a six-point lead they wouldn’t relinquish.”With the way we have been acting and feeling sorry for ourselves that was a critical juncture down 10 with no life whatsoever,” Mitchell said. “So you give credit to those kids that went out there and flipped that 20-point swing and I did need to see that.”Mitchell didn’t mince words in talking about the importance of that stretch, calling it a “very critical juncture for this team.” The Cats didn’t realize at that exact moment that it may have been a crossroads for their season, but they did after the fact.”It was extremely important because that’s something we’ve been struggling with for the past games now,” Jennifer O’Neill said. “But I think the biggest thing was, when we were down 10, we played with poise. We weren’t panicking; we didn’t look to rush things. We played with poise and a sense of urgency.”O’Neill scored only two points during the game-changing run, but Mitchell said she was “the best player on the floor” Sunday. She scored a team-high 21 points, hitting five 3-pointers and adding six rebounds and five assists, also team highs. The performance came just three days after O’Neill scored just four points and took just two shots in the Alabama loss.”That is how she has to play and she made things happen today and I am so proud of her defense,” Mitchell said. “She just has to have her mind right.”Helping on that front was a pregame meeting between Mitchell and the junior point guard, who was inserted into the starting lineup for just the second time this season.”I had just spoke with Matthew before the game and I was just telling him, ‘Basically, I need you to tell me what you need me to do before games,’ ” O’Neill said. “And that’s something he did before and he stopped doing and it was helping me so I went back and told him.”That was just another example of Mitchell going back to coaching tactics that have worked well for him in the past, the most prominent of course being his demeanor and intense practice plan. “It kind of reminds me back to my freshman year,” Bria Goss said. “What we’ve done the past couple days has been what we did my freshman year and we were very successful, winning the SEC regular-season championship. So it’s good to see him have that fire back, I guess.””Like Matthew said, his mentality has changed from Mr. Nice Guy to being more intense,” O’Neill said. “That’s going to reflect on us and I feel like you guys are going to see that from games here on out.”That’s the hope, but Mitchell isn’t about to let his guard down.”I am not saying we are out of the woods yet,” Mitchell said. “We have a lot of work to do. We have to find a group that wants to fight and show up every day and play and once we do that we will be fine. We have always been really good with a situation like that.”