Tennessee head coach Rick Barnes takes an honest approach when talking to potential prospects in the transfer portal. He offers praise where he sees fit, but also points out the aspects in which he feels like can be improved on in the future. Barnes and the Tennessee staff show it like it is.
“We’re not — we often say, ‘don’t get recruited. We don’t wanna recruit you. We just wanna show you what we got, and if it’s good enough, and if it’s what you want, we want you to be here, or you wouldn’t be here,'” Barnes said while speaking to the media last month. “And we’ve tried to make an effort to — the guys that we brought on campus, we knew that we wanted them.”
That honest approach was something that stuck out to Wake Forest transfer Juke Harris, who signed with the Vols last week. Harris is a consensus Top 10 portal player on the major websites and is the highest-ranked addition in the Vols’ transfer class.
“Another thing that [Barnes] did that separated himself from everybody else is he came in and told me how good I was, but he also got on me about some stuff they can see that I need to work on,” Harris said on Thursday’s episode of The Mike Keith Show on YouTube. “Like turning my body more when I come off screen, turning my body facing the goal. Different things that I need to do on the defensive side, fighting over screens, making sure I’m closing out. So they showed me little stuff like that. And I seen some stuff that I needed to work on that I didn’t even know, that they had seen. So I feel like I’ll be more of a complete player going into Tennessee next year.”
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Tennessee has found success in the portal over the last few seasons, with three straight SEC Newcomer of the Year awards: Dalton Knecht in 2023, Chaz Lanier in 2024, and Ja’Kobi Gillespie in 2025. Part of that reason is because of the Vols’ identification process and the vision to take players as they are and find the key areas of growth to take their game to the next level.
After a long recruitment process that saw him land with the Vols, Harris officially withdrew his name from the NBA Draft as he fully committed to returning to college. It wasn’t a decision that he made lightly, but one that he felt confident in.
“I feel like my main focus coming to Cali was going through the whole NBA process, even going to the Combine,” Harris said. “But having different conversations with different colleges and also maybe some feedback from the NBA scouts, I felt like it was the best opportunity to just lay out everything that I had in front of me, actually take a few conversations with different coaches and just seeing what was best for me. And I felt like Tennessee was the best place, the (best) option for me to return back to school to.”
Harris was a tremendous addition for the Volunteers and should prove to be an immediate impact player. During his breakout season with Wake Forest last year, Harris was 16th in the nation with 21.4 points per game. He also tallied 6.5 rebounds and 1.9 assists per contest and shot 44.4% from the floor.
Check out Juke Harris’ full interview on The Mike Keith Show below:
