page_title: John Calipari
section_title: Playing career
hierarchical_section_title: John Calipari / Playing career
caption_attribution_description: English: John Calipari was on the 1979-1980 University of North Carolina, Wilmington basketball team.
context_page_description: John Vincent Calipari is an American basketball coach. Since 2009, he has been the head coach of the University of Kentucky men's team, with whom he won the NCAA Championship in 2012. He has been named Naismith College Coach of the Year three times, and was inducted into the Basketball Hall of Fame in 2015.
  He was previously the head coach at the University of Massachusetts from 1988 to 1996, the NBA's New Jersey Nets from 1996 to 1999 and the University of Memphis from 2000 to 2009, and was the head coach of the Dominican Republic national team in 2011 and 2012.
  Calipari has coached Kentucky to four Final Fours, in 2011, 2012, 2014 and 2015. He also led UMass and Memphis to the Final Four in 1996 and 2008 respectively; those appearances were later vacated, though Calipari was cleared of wrongdoing in both cases. As a college coach, Calipari has twenty-six 20-win seasons, eleven 30-win seasons, and five 35-win seasons.
  As of March 7th 2020, with 733 official wins, Calipari ranks 23rd on the NCAA Division 1 all-time winningest coaches list.
context_section_description: Calipari was a high school point guard who was a fringe division one prospect. 
  Calipari lettered two years at UNC Wilmington before transferring to Clarion University of Pennsylvania, from which he graduated with a bachelor's degree in marketing. He played point guard at Clarion during the 1981 and 1982 seasons, leading the team in assists and free throw percentage.
caption: John Calipari, 1979–1980 UNCW basketball team
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