ARLINGTON, Texas — With everything going on in Orlando Antigua’s head these days, if he can sleep it’s from pure exhaustion. As Kentucky prepares for Wisconsin in the Final Four, Antigua’s not only worrying about how to slow down Frank Kaminsky and the highly efficient Badger offense, he’s also got a new program to build, players to recruit and a foundation to set at South Florida, where he took the head-coaching job on Monday.Fortunately for Antigua and the Cats, USF gave Antigua permission to stay through UK’s Final Four run this weekend, allowing Antigua to focus on finishing Kentucky’s late-season run.”You try to take one thing at a time right now,” Antigua said. “Mark (Harlan) has been gracious to obviously allow me to finish out this run that we have going. I try to text message with the kids back at South Florida just to make sure that they’re watching and taking care of their academics while we’re here.”His kids right now, though, still wear blue and white and they’ve still got an objective to complete at the Final Four in Arlington, Texas. Antigua said those kids “look great” heading into Saturday’s national semifinals.”They’re working hard,” Antigua said. “Crazy enough, still got room to grow. That’s exciting us. We’re trying to push them every day.”Antigua got emotional at Monday’s USF press conference in Tampa, Fla., when he started to think about and thank everyone who helped him earn the head-coaching opportunity. Those people included the players, who were “ecstatic” for their coach.”When I got back from the press conference they all started busting my chops,” Antigua said. “But it’s great. They’re a great group of kids and I’m really happy for the experience that I got a chance to have by being at Kentucky and being with the staff. The administration has been phenomenal and the relationships that I’ve built there will be relationships that I think I’ll have for the rest of my career.”Of course, one of the most important and most influential relationships he had was with John Calipari, whom Antigua has served under for the last six seasons (five at Kentucky and one at Memphis). Antigua said he’s always wanted to become a head coach since getting into the business, but it took some mentoring and experience from working under Coach Cal and Jamie Dixon at Pittsburgh to prepare him to run his own program.”(Calipari) taught me how to adjust to the personnel that you have, how to keep challenging kids, how to keep raising the bar,” Antigua said.In the coming months and years we’ll see if Calipari taught him how to schedule. Asked Thursday if he’d get a home-and-home series with UK given the connections, Antigua smiled knowing full well that negotiating a deal like that with Coach Cal won’t be so easy.”I hope so,” he said. “I hope to eventually maybe work something out, but haven’t even gotten that far down the line.”Capture the flagBy now you are probably well aware of the type of historic path Kentucky has had to conquer to make it to the Final Four.Among the most notable achievements:

• UK is the first school even to knock off three of the four Final Four teams from the previous season
• According to Jeff Eisenberg of Yahoo! Sports, the Cats’ path, seeding-wise, is the toughest any team has had to navigate since LSU in 1986.

Thursday, at the first of two Final Four media appearances, Coach Cal said he didn’t even know what to call what the Cats just went through.”We got here through an absolute mine field and happened to not step on a mine,” he said.Now that they can see the flag they’re trying to capture, Calipari is trying to make sure his guys don’t wander off their path and step on one of those mines.”Now my whole mission is to make sure we’re not satisfied, that this team is still striving,” he said.Still freshmenThere’s a notion among some coaches that when you get to this stage in the year, freshmen are no longer freshmen. Some like to say they have the experience of a sophomore and can play like veterans.Last Calipari checked, his freshmen hadn’t been granted any type of waiver to skip a year in college. “They’re still freshmen,” Calipari said. But there is some truth that these freshmen are more experienced than any other ones in college. UK’s freshmen have accounted for 75.3 percent of the Cats’ minutes this year. It took nearly every second for them to finally capitalize on that experience. “It took us four months,” Calipari said. “So now they got it. They’re young. It takes time. You cannot skip steps. We all want to skip steps. We all want freshmen to be sophomores and juniors.”It’s Kentucky – what do you expect?It didn’t take long for Calipari to answer a reporter’s question on Thursday as to why his program can sometimes be a magnet for criticism.”It’s Kentucky,” Coach Cal quickly shot back.The reporter, a little surprised by such a quick answer, then wondered if he had a sense that some people enjoyed when UK was struggling in the regular season. Again, Calipari had the same answer.”It’s Kentucky,” he said. “It’s what you buy into if you want to coach at Kentucky or play at Kentucky. You got some guys with agendas. You got some guys that, you know, it’s that program. It’s part of it.”To bring you more expansive coverage, CoachCal.com and Cat Scratches
will be joining forces for the postseason. You can read the same great
stories you are accustomed to from both sites at CoachCal.com and
UKathletics.com/blog, but now you’ll enjoy even more coverage than
normal.