If the first six months of the Mark Stoops era and the Blue/White Spring Game are any indication, Commonwealth Stadium should be a popular place to be in the fall. And as always, buying season tickets remains the best and most cost-effective way to attend every game in 2013.

Season tickets cost $277 for sideline seats and $242 in the end zone. Paying single-game prices, you would spend $420 to attend all seven games, which translates to a savings of at least $143 per ticket plus getting to know where you will be sitting for every home game.

To purchase season tickets, visit UKfootballtix.com today.

Fans who buy season tickets before July 14 will receive them in new "All-In" books and those who buy before June 28 will have an exclusive first chance to select home and away single-game tickets by that date. Print this form to place your order.

If you're eager to see UK football in action as soon as possible, your first chance will be in Nashville, Tenn., on Saturday, August 31 when the Wildcats face Western Kentucky University. Tickets are $63 for club level, $43 for lower sideline, and $38 for lower end zone.  Order tickets online or by calling (800) 928-2287. Seats will be assigned according to K Fund points after the June 28th priority deadline.

This is the first of two stories on Erik Korem and the High Performance program he and Mark Stoops have brought to Kentucky football. Stay tuned next week to read about the international roots of the program and Korem's continual learning process.

Looking around Erik Korem's workspace, football isn't the first thing that comes to mind.

Other than a detailed report of a few pages he'll soon be presenting to his boss, his desk is clean. He scrolls through color-coded spreadsheets on the two monitors set up in front of him, but Korem talks of custom-built software that will eventually replace much of Microsoft Excel's everyday function. He uses phrases like "best practices" and "predictive models" sure to be repeated in board meetings inside skyscrapers in New York or Chicago.

But Korem works on the ground floor of the Nutter Training Center. His spreadsheets analyze the performance of Kentucky football players. His boss is Mark Stoops.

In essence, his office is the heart of the High Performance initiative taking over all facets of the program. With Korem - UK's High Performance Coach - leading the way, the goal is simple.

"What we want to do is make sure that, physiologically, they're at their optimal level," Korem said.

Simple as that guiding philosophy may be, putting it into practice is anything but.

To that end, Korem, his staff and his technology are involved in everything from strength and conditioning to developing practice plans to monitoring the sleeping and eating habits of UK student-athletes.

"What I am constantly investigating is: How do we get our guys ready?' " Korem said. "How do we monitor their state of readiness? Are they fatigued? Are they psychologically stressed? Are we overloading them? Where do we need to back off? Are we susceptible to injury?"

The program is the first of its kind in college athletics and even American sports, says Korem, but what's going on at UK didn't come together overnight. Korem began to apply sports-science principles when he was at Florida State and Stoops took note. When he was tabbed to become a head coach for the first time by UK Athletics Director Mitch Barnhart, Stoops knew he wanted to bring Korem with him.

But as important as Korem may be to its execution, he makes it clear that High Performance is Stoops' baby.

"It's his brainchild," Korem said. "He's made it all possible. He's just letting me and my staff roll, which is fun."

The installation of the High Performance program has not been without its challenges. Defensive coordinator D.J. Eliot is the lone assistant on Stoops' staff to have worked with Korem, which made spring practice a training ground for coaches as much as players as they learned how to interact with Korem and the information he provides.

"This doesn't really happen any place where you've got this guy explaining to you about practice and why we need to back off or push this guy harder," Korem said. "That's a new concept. At first, there's a learning curve."

Over the last six months, Korem believes the learning curve has been scaled.

"I think everybody's getting really comfortable and they realize, number one, that this is Coach Stoops' idea; this isn't Erik Korem's idea," Korem said. "And then number two, I'm here to support them. I'm here to help support their decision-making, I'm here to help make them better coaches in any way I can. It's more about a servant attitude than it is me telling people what to do. That's not what it's about. It's about serving our coaches and serving our players."

In many ways, Korem's primary function with the coaching staff is to be a funnel. He has a wealth of data at his disposal, but he knows there is such a thing as too much information.

"We just have very simple things so these coaches can make fast decisions," Korem said. "That's the whole deal: You can have all the information in the world, but if you can't make a quick decision off of it, you're wasting your time."

For example, Korem is developing a stop-light system for coaches to use in practice to protect against injuries. If a player is designated green, he's good for full-speed work. Yellow means the player should be treated with caution.

As for educating the players, Korem is taking a slow and steady approach.

"We don't want to overload our guys with questionnaires or things to do after training," Korem said. "We start with a couple things to get them really comfortable and have them master that. And then we move on and add another little piece."

During the summer, coaches are prohibited from working with players, but not Korem. Not everyone may like the NCAA rules that limit practice time, but Korem believes they benefit student-athletes.

"This is a superior model in my opinion," Korem said, referencing the international sports programs that have inspired much of what is being installed at UK. "They need a time where they can purely focus on biological development: power output, getting healthy."

Korem is certainly taking advantage of that time. He has devised 12 different training programs tailored to fit different positional groups. Beyond that, workouts are customized further based on individual injury history and a number of other factors.

"Our linebackers don't train the way our quarterbacks train," Korem said. "There's some crossover, but that's why we have all these different groups."

Always looking to put High Performance tenets into more accessible terms, Korem has a come up with a metaphor to describe what he wants to accomplish in the summer months.

"I tell the guys we're developing bigger batteries, so we're going to go from triple-As to Ds," Korem said. "And then we want to develop a bigger and better gas tank. June is more about the battery and July is about the gas tank."

The battery part of the process is about improving maximum outputs in terms of power, speed and strength. In July, the Cats will work on their capacity to repeat.

Korem likes the way the student-athletes have embraced that message.

"We want these guys to take ownership of it, because it's not really what happens in the two hours they're with us; it's what happens in the 22 hours they're not with us," Korem said. "I want them to be their own coaches."

"They've done an awesome job. I couldn't be more proud of these guys because we come in with all these sweeping changes and telling them we want them to eat this way and eat that way. They have latched on and they have carried the ball and done well with it."

By doing that, Korem believes the Cats are positioning themselves for improvement on the field.

"We're going to push these guys hard, we're going to work them very hard, but we're going to work them very intelligently," Korem said. "I think that's the beauty behind what we do: We're maximizing what we've got."

Accordingly, Korem sees himself as executing the latter half of Stoops' "Recruit and Develop" mantra, but his High Performance endeavors have been a factor in UK's unprecedented success on the trail too. Visiting recruits might not want to comb through spreadsheets with Korem, but they can't help but be impressed when they stop by his office.

"They love it," Korem said. "We offer something nobody else offers, we really do. They come in and we'll show them things we're doing and they don't see this anywhere else. It's exciting for them."

Within hours of landing in Ethiopia, Avery Williamson began to wonder what he had gotten himself into.

After a 13-hour flight, Williamson and his two UK teammates landed in Bole Bulbula, a village in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia's capital city. They stepped off the plane, immediately distributing water filters to residents without clean water.

Williamson was excited about the athletic department-sponsored service trip before he left, but amid wholly unfamiliar surroundings, anxiety began to set in. By the end of his week in Ethiopia, however, it disappeared.

"The first day I got there I was really homesick, honestly," Williamson said. "I was ready to come back. But after being over there for a week, I wasn't ready to come back home."

In spite of some initial nervousness, Williamson embraced everything the trip had to offer. He allowed his perception of poverty to change when he saw the conditions in the leper colony of Korah. He didn't try to avoid seeing children as young as five years old begged for spare change or food.

"I was really surprised but the living conditions and stuff," Williamson said. "You see it on TV but until you really see it in person it starts to hit you. You start thinking about it and like, 'I could not live like this.' That is how those people live out their lives and they are accustomed to it."

By the time it was all over, he wasn't thinking about sleeping in his warm bed, changing into clean clothes or raiding a stocked refrigerator. Instead, he was trying to figure out how he could do more. Williamson, Jonathan George and Kevin Mitchell spent much of the flight home to the United States thinking about finding their way back to the country that had so deeply affected them.

"I was really glad to go over there and be able to help," George said. "In the future, I would really like to go back and do some more stuff for the people in Ethiopia."

But before they can make a return trip, Williamson, George and Mitchell have to resume their normal lives as Kentucky football players.

All three will be seniors on new head coach Mark Stoops' first UK team. Summer workouts are already underway and they are all expected to play important leadership roles in 2013. That, in fact, is a major reason why their coaches tabbed them to make the trip.

"It is more people that are working hard and being leaders on the team that get selected," Williamson said. "I thought it was a big honor for me to get chosen because there have been some great guys that have went on this trip in the past and I was very humbled by it."

Danny Trevathan and Stuart Hines went on the inaugural trip in 2011 and Mikie Benton, Matt Smith and Larry Warford followed last May. All five brought their changed perspectives home and used them to help guide their teammates. Williamson, George and Mitchell will now look to do the same.

Though his thoughts won't be far from the people with whom he built relationships in Ethiopia, George believes an increased awareness of how blessed he and his teammates are to have so many opportunities will make them even hungrier to capitalize.

"One of the things I took from this trip was being thankful and being appreciative for the things I do have," George said. "I've always felt that way about things being appreciative of what you have because there is always somebody that has it worse, but I feel like this opened up my eyes even more to that topic because some of the things I saw and experienced it was real rough to see people going through those types of things."

On Thursday, Avery Williamson, Kevin Mitchell and Jonathan George - the three Kentucky football players who made a service trip to Ethiopia in late May - spoke to the media about the week they spent in the East African nation. See what they had to say in the video below.


I'll have a story a little later this afternoon about the trio hoping to return to Ethiopia soon to continue their service. Before then, here are links to the three travel logs we posted with Williamson, Mitchell and George in case you missed them.

Mitchell embracing experience
George, Cats visit local prisons
Williamson thinking about the people as trip ends

With the summer session about to begin, freshmen from numerous UK teams are beginning to arrive on campus for the first time. Included among them is football's highly touted incoming class. Take a look at this video from their move-in.