LOUISVILLE, Ky. (WDRB) — From where Chris Redman sat Friday in the Louisville Kings' Arlington, Texas, headquarters, the view looks like pro sports royalty.
AT&T Stadium — the Dallas Cowboys' billion-dollar palace — is off in the distance. Globe Life Field, home of the Texas Rangers, rises nearby. Big-league America, fixed in steel and glass, humming with certainty.
Somewhere between those landmarks, inside the UFL's sprawling shared complex, the Louisville Kings are holding their first meetings as a football team.
They are, at the moment, at the opposite end of that spectrum. Players arrived Thursday, and, on Friday, began the unglamorous paperwork of building something from scratch — names to learn, physicals to pass, equipment to issue, meetings to hold. All of it before a ball has been snapped.
"Every opportunity is right in front of you." 🗣️ pic.twitter.com/4LKYlzbh7n
— Louisville Kings (@UFLKings) February 20, 2026
The players come from all over, quietly calculating where they stand on a depth chart that doesn't yet exist. Redman expects 64 to open camp Monday, with the roster trimming to 43 by the time the Kings open against Birmingham on March 27.
It feels less like the start of a season and more like move-in day at a school that hasn't opened yet.
For many of these players, this isn't their first locker room. But it may be one of their most important.
"This is a lot of guys' last chance," Redman said. "It's their next chance to get to where they want to be."
This is also Redman's first chance to run a team, and he built his staff with that in mind. Defensive coordinator Jamie Sharper helped win the UFL championship last year with Washington. Offensive coordinator Steve Logan and assistant Jeff Jagodzinski both bring college head coaching experience. Redman didn't hire them in spite of his inexperience at this level, but because of it.
"It makes all the difference in the world when you have people around you to help you walk you through different things," he said. "You obviously put your special sauce on there as well."
The collective football knowledge in the room runs deep, maybe deeper than it needs to in some places.
"We have more plays than we know what to do with," Redman said. "Now it's just figuring out what kind of team we have, what are the right plays to put these guys in positions to be successful."
Practice begins Monday, though Redman intends to keep the early sessions controlled. Injuries tend to cluster in the first two weeks of camp, and with a long road ahead he'd rather build slowly than lose players before the season starts.
"We're going to walk before we run," he said.
They can't move too slowly. This isn't an NFL timeline.
"There's a lot of schedules, but you've got to make your schedule unique to fit into a UFL schedule," Redman said. "We have time. We've got four weeks here until we get up and going. There is time. But it's not the preseason schedule of an NFL team. So you've got to condense that."
For now the priority is installation — getting the playbook in, getting aligned, learning each other. "A lot of meetings," Redman said. The physical part comes later.
What struck Redman most about Friday, he said, was simply having everyone together in the same room after weeks of video calls and remote planning.
"Once you get guys in the office and you look at them, you can feel their excitement," he said. "The room gets tense and quiet. There are a lot of nerves out there."
That's the fuel he's counting on. These aren't players coasting into a comfortable situation. They're players with something to prove, which tends to make for an attentive locker room.
"I can tell this is a great opportunity to coach a group of guys that are hungry to play in the NFL and get back to that upper echelon," Redman said. "Those are the kind of guys you want to coach."
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