BATON ROUGE – On this Veteran’s Day, it seems fitting to salute a group of Special Operations veterans who are helping this “Unconventional” LSU men’s basketball team this season in an unconventional way.
Recently in a postgame media session, LSU Coach Will Wade, who has used the term “unconventional” to discuss his 2026-27 Tigers that are 3-0 heading to a Saturday game in Spokane, Washington with Gonzaga, talked about the team’s association this year with ROPE Solutions, a group of veterans embedded with LSU men’s basketball since the team’s first week together when the semester started.
"ROPE Solutions. They're incredible," Wade said. "They're embedded with us at all times. We've got these military guys that sit behind the bench with us."
Russell Williamson, ROPE's CEO, defines unconventional warfare in one line: "To build capacity using a small element and create an outsized effect."
That was where we found the Tigers, with multiple international players learning a new system, a roster that to the outside world seemed slow to build, and a team that appeared to start weeks behind the rest of the conference. A handful of ROPE coaches could not put practice days back on the calendar, but they could speed up how fast a roster of new teammates learned to trust each other.
Every new program faces the same challenges. LSU faced all of them at once, on a shorter clock.
When Wade was rehired on March 26, there was no team to inherit. A program that started from nothing is missing things that are often taken for granted: a shared history, a common language, a settled roster, time and margin for error.
Being secure in the plan is one thing. Getting a room full of strangers to execute it together is the part no playbook covers. That is the gap ROPE was brought in to close.
Wade explained: "We brought in a group of special operators," he said.
These are men who spent their careers building teams out of people who had never worked together.
"They've worked all over the world in the military and integrate those teams," Wade said. "Get those teams communicating at a high level."
It’s imperative in these days of college sports when 1) rosters turn over every year; 2) rosters are more international and 3) coaches are stretched and asked to do more to be successful.
ROPE takes that job. "They work on our efficiencies, they work on some of the language barriers, some of the different cultural things," Wade said.
Efficiency is where ROPE gets its name: Rapidly Optimizing Performance & Efficiency. College athletics had little to compare its embedded model to, so the proof came from the oil industry: crews that moved rigs 73% faster, cut non-productive time by 66%, and lifted performance 22% across an entire basin.
"A basketball game is 40 minutes, and every second counts," Williamson said. "But those seconds are won or lost in the days leading up to it. Our job is to make sure none of that time gets wasted."
The embedded model is the game changer. The standard across the industry is to bring someone in, deliver a talk on a topic, and send them home. ROPE's coaches stay. "They rotate," Wade said. "There's somebody here every day."
That puts them in the gym for the coaching moment, when the pressure hits and a lesson either holds or breaks. A tool taught on Monday gets coached on Thursday, in the middle of a hard practice, by the same man who taught it.
It all started on a weekend. A weekend retreat which has been a standard of Will Wade’s coaching tenure. But this year it was different. Wade handed it to ROPE.
"They ran our retreat," he said. "I gave the retreat over to them. I typically run it, but I let them run a lot of it."
"Most teams in the conference had been together since mid-July," Williamson said. "Ours didn't come together until September 1, so we used the retreat weekend to play catch up."
Some of the players were meeting for the first time that week. ROPE built the retreat around three words: Identify. Disclose. Connect.
It is the same sequence unconventional warfare operators run when they are thrown together with partners they have never worked with.
"Nobody in that room owed each other anything yet," said Steve Brush, one of ROPE's coaches. "Trust starts when somebody goes first. That weekend, guys went first."
Wade's review was short. "They've done a phenomenal job," he said. "That's expedited what we've done."
ROPE coaches the non-technical side of performance. That means building up everything beyond technical knowledge and skill, so players have more capacity to grow in those areas too.
"We don't teach dribbling, shooting, or dunking," Williamson said. "We help players become better communicators who are more self-aware and understand each other better. That makes them better teammates, sons, brothers, and fathers. The result is better players."
The coaching is fully embedded. ROPE's coaches are in the gym, on the road, and on the sideline. Brush was walking point with a Force Recon team in Helmand Province fifteen years ago. This season he is courtside in Baton Rouge.
The method is built to feel familiar. "We coach the way they already learn," Williamson said. "Every tool we give them gets drilled like a play in practice, so they use it naturally on the court."
That lines up with the identity Wade has laid out for this team. "We want to be unconventional; we want to be connected," he said.
"You feel really good about our country when you hang around these cats," Wade said. “They've really, really helped us."