This is the ONLY officially sanctioned and endorsed John Calipari qfive page. John Calipari is the head basketball coach at the University of Kentucky. For more on Coach Cal and Wildcat basketball, please visit www.coachcal.com. Coach Cal reached the mountaintop in his third year in Lexington, guiding Kentucky to its eighth national championship and 15th Final Four. In doing so, he claimed his first national championship and his fourth appearance in the Final Four. In becoming only the second coach in NCAA history to lead three different schools to the Final Four, he has racked up more than 500 victories, 14 NCAA Tournament appearances and numerous national coach of the year honors. While building a program out of obscurity at Massachusetts, laying the foundation at Memphis and restoring luster at college basketball’s greatest program at Kentucky, he has totaled the second-most wins in NCAA history in the first 20 years of a college coaching career. In his goal to lead a players-first program, he has helped 27 players realize their dreams and guide them to the NBA, including a record five first-round draft picks in 2010. The very next season, four of his players earned NBA selections, and six Wildcats heard their names called at the 2012 draft, the most in the two-round draft era. His three No. 1 overall selections are the most all-time. Much like he did at UMass, where his players graduated at nearly 80 percent, Calipari has stressed academics. Fifteen of his last 18 seniors at Memphis earned their bachelor’s degrees, and all six seniors under Cal at UK have walked away with a diploma in hand. The Wildcats posted a 3.12 grade-point average for the 2012 spring semester. His foundation, the Calipari Family Foundation, has raised millions of dollars to help the lives of those in need in the Commonwealth and across the country, and in 2010, he used a telethon to raise more than $1 million for victims of the devastating earthquake in Haiti.