Last March, Travis Ford wasn’t circling Little Rock when he started thinking about getting back into men’s college basketball. The job came from outside his line of sight. Then his agent, Evan Daniels, kept pushing the idea, and Ford finally took the meeting that changed everything.
“I wasn’t interested in (Little Rock) at all,” Ford said Tuesday morning in a phone call. “There (were) several other schools that were talking to me, (but) my agent (Evan Daniels) kept calling me back and said ‘I think you might need to talk (to Little Rock). They might have exactly what you’re looking for.’”
Ford said that first conversation with athletics director Frank M. Cuervo stretched on for three hours, long enough for the two sides to see the fit.
“We ended up sitting and talking for three hours,” Ford said. “... His vision kind of lined (up) with what I was going to need to get back in (coaching).”
Now Ford is set to bring his Little Rock team into Rupp Arena on Friday night for an exhibition against Kentucky, the program where he once starred as a point guard on the 1993 Final Four team. Tipoff is 7 p.m. EDT.
“I’m excited to bring my team there to experience Rupp Arena,” Ford said.
For Ford, 56, Little Rock is the fifth NCAA Division I head-coaching job on a long résumé that also includes Eastern Kentucky, Massachusetts, Oklahoma State and Saint Louis. Over 24 combined seasons leading those programs, he has gone 424-335, a 55.9% winning percentage.
His teams have reached the NCAA Tournament seven times, with one trip at Eastern Kentucky, five at Oklahoma State and one at Saint Louis. His 2007-08 UMass team also finished as the NIT runner-up.
After Saint Louis moved on from him following the 2023-24 season, Ford spent two years away from coaching. That break gave him something his career had rarely allowed: time to sit in the stands at Rupp Arena and watch Kentucky play.
“Until two years ago, I’d never gotten to do that,” he said.
When he decided he wanted back into coaching for 2026-27, Ford knew what he wanted the next stop to look like. Little Rock checked the boxes.
“If I got back in, I wanted an opportunity to build something and have the resources to do it,” Ford said. “And I think we have that (at Little Rock).
We got great, elite facilities. They’re committed to basketball.
Little Rock’s a big city of almost 800 (thousand) people.
“We’re the only show in town. The University of Arkansas is almost three hours away. So I think this could be a sleeping giant.”
He’ll need to build fast. Little Rock returns only sophomore forward Terrion Burgess from a 12-20 team, and Ford said he recruited the other 15 players on the roster in the six weeks after he took the job.
Even then, he isn’t pretending the team’s ceiling is obvious yet.
“We don’t know,” Ford said. “It’s a good question.
I don’t know. People keep asking that.
You would think I would know. But it’s hard to tell.
I like our guys a lot. I think we have some depth, that is going to be a strength.
Now, how good is it? I don’t know.”
There’s one more wrinkle to this return trip to Kentucky. Ford’s father, Eddie Ford, who was a familiar presence around Kentucky summer basketball, won’t be in the arena Friday night. He died May 31, 2025, at 81.
“‘You know, he went to pretty much every game,” Travis Ford said. “So, yeah, I’ve thought about that, even coming out Friday night, he won’t be there.
So, it’s been a little different. But I just think about him a lot.”
Ford also weighed in on Kentucky itself, and he likes this group far more than the preseason SEC poll did. The Wildcats were picked seventh in the league, but Ford doesn’t see them staying there.
“I think they’ve got a great team,” Ford said of Kentucky. “I saw where they were picked seventh.
There’s no way they’re going to finish seventh in the SEC. They’ll finish a lot higher.
I think they’re a top-15 team, top-10 team in the country.”
He knows the setting well. From 2000 through 2007, Ford coached against Kentucky four times in games that counted, three of them at Eastern Kentucky and one at Massachusetts. Kentucky won all four, though Eastern Kentucky pushed the Wildcats hard in a 72-64 loss in the NCAA Tournament round of 64 in 2004-05.
As he gets ready for his fifth Division I head-coaching job, Ford said the years away from the bench have changed his outlook.
“I think I’m a little more patient, see life a little differently,” he said. “And I hope that helps me be a better coach and a better mentor for these young men.”
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