If Courtney Love needed any additional motivation to jumpstart the Kentucky defense following his transfer from Nebraska, he received a boost on a recent service trip to Ethiopia.

Traveling with members of the University of Kentucky athletics department, including two other football players and a trainer, Love recently spent six days on the ground in a poverty-ridden area of the country located in the Horn of Africa. In a recent interview with Saturday Down South, Love said it was a “huge eye-opener” to visit an area where people had nothing, yet appreciated everything.

“Just waking up everyday or just working hard to maintain what they have,” Love said last week. “They really don’t have anything. It was awesome to see that. It’s just going to be something that makes me want to work harder and motivation to see how people are living. Some people like that, they could need some help and I could be a guy to do that. I could be a guy that could go back over there and make a difference, help out children, help out families that are in need.”

During the trip, Love worked with a group that made huts, which served as houses, out of wood, mud and clay. They added wood to the houses, and installed sheet metal for the roof and mud between the walls.

“Got a lot of time to learn how to use the hammer really good,” Love said.

Another project was making shoe-shining boxes for homeless people who shine shoes for a living. Love said business people wearing clean shoes is one of the most important things in Ethiopia, and the shoe shiners “make a good buck.”

The trip came three months after Love was one of three players — along with running back Jojo Kemp and tight end C.J. Conrad — to model the Wildcats’ new uniforms. Love was one of several players who sat out last year after transferring.

“We’re ready to compete and help make the team better and get it to where it wants to go. We all have the same goal, want to get to that next step,” Love said. “I think that’s going to be huge for us to be able to play this year because we’ve got guys who are buying in having us play, just get ready to compete overall.”

Love, a Youngstown, Ohio, native, chose Kentucky in part because it was closer to home as his grandmother and great-grandmother battled health issues. They both died last fall, but Love said he was grateful to spend time with his grandmother.

“My grandmother when she passed away, it was something that I needed to do because if I had been in Nebraska, I wouldn’t have been able to spend any time leading up to her passing away,” Love said. “It was really a blessing spending her final moments with her, and family, when they needed it the most.”

Love, a 6-foot-2, 240-pound sophomore, has yet to play a down for Kentucky, but he’s one of the few defenders, and linebackers especially, who have college experience. In 2014, he played in 12 games and had six tackles for the Cornhuskers. But during his redshirt year the previous season, he was named Nebraska’s Scout Team Defensive MVP.

Given so many new faces on defense, Love said responsibilities spread across the field.

“I feel like the whole defense as a unit, we all need to be counted on to deliver because we all have something to prove,” he said. “Everybody’s going to have to work hard to pull this thing together to be the best defense we can be. Linebackers have to be on top of everything and I want to make sure we’re doing everything we need to do.

“With everybody being new and going through the same thing, we all have common goals and we all have common issues that might bother us. We all can help each other out as far as being a new defense.”

Because of the state of the Kentucky defense and few stars in the front seven outside of linebacker Denzil Ware, Love sees being named a captain as a goal to reach.

“It’s something I’ve dreamed about my whole life, being a captain of the defense, being the guy that guys like to lean on. That’s something that I always wanted to do, and I’ve got to take advantage of it,” he said. “Be the leader the guys need me to be. We’re all going to be leaders and do what we can to make our defense better.”

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