photo by: Nick Krug

Former Jayhawk guard and director of basketball operations Brett Ballard checks the scoreboard during a timeout in this Dec. 20, 2008 file photo from Allen Fieldhouse.

Washburn basketball coach Brett Ballard has known about Thursday’s exhibition clash with his alma mater for about 18 months, but he and his former boss have hardly talked about it.

“We banter and talk about a lot of different stuff, but this hasn’t come up much,” said Ballard, the former KU walk-on who also worked on KU coach Bill Self’s staff for seven years after graduating in 2003. “To be honest, I’ve kind of tried to avoid talking about it.”

There’s no avoiding it now. At 7 p.m. Thursday night, Ballard will be seated — probably standing or pacing, more likely — in an unfamiliar seat in Allen Fieldhouse, trying to slug it out with a man who enters the 2018-19 season with 654 career victories and, last year, was inducted into the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame.

To say the challenge is daunting would be putting it mildly. But Ballard’s approach to Washburn’s clash with Kansas — both leading up to it and his plans during Thursday’s game — have made the whole thing more manageable.

“I think it’s OK to be realistic in certain situations,” Ballard said. “Look, we’re not Michigan State. And we know that. But that doesn’t mean we’re not going to go in there, compete hard and give everything we have to play well.

“You know, that’s really the main thing. You just want your team to go play well. Not only for us, so we can get better. But I also want to help Kansas get better and for them to get something out of these exhibition games.”

For Ballard, the idea of getting something out of Kansas is a familiar one.

From the day he first stepped foot in Allen Fieldhouse as an 8-year-old who watched Roy Williams’ Jayhawks drub Kentucky 150-95 — “That was so cool. I felt like I could’ve floated out of Allen Fieldhouse that day,” Ballard says — to his time as a walk-on under Williams and an assistant under Self, so much of who Ballard is, as a coach and a man, came from the lessons he learned at Kansas.

He values each one of them more and more as the years go by and found it difficult to point to just one when asked recently about the most important thing he learned from Self.

“That’s such a hard question,” Ballard said. “I’ve spent so much time with him and learned so much. I’ve watched film with him at 2 a.m. I’ve been in the locker room with him for a national championship game. I’ve been through thousands of practices and even been to a Bon Jovi concert with him.

So it’s kind of hard to wrap all of that into one thing. But, in any of those situations, regardless of what my title was, he always treated me with respect and always valued what I brought to the program or the friendship or whatever the situation was. As a young coach, he showed me you can be a high-level coach and treat people the right way and that doesn’t make you any less of a leader. That was probably one of the biggest lessons. If you treat people the right way, it’s amazing how that reciprocates back to you.”

Ballard was not the only one handing out compliments this week.

“It’ll be good to see Brett and watch his team play,” Self said. “I know they’ll be well-coached and well-prepared. I hope the fans welcome him like he deserves to be welcomed.”

Asked to recall some traits that made Ballard stand out during his days at Kansas, Self said his former assistant was “as valuable as any coach we had.”

“He was very organized and very disciplined and had personality. People like him, players reacted well to him. Very professional on all fronts. … Brett will be loved over there for a long time.”

Just how much love Self’s Jayhawks will show Ballard’s Ichabods remains to be seen. But the second-year Washburn coach whose previous stops have included Tulsa and Wake Forest as a top assistant for Danny Manning and a stint at Baker University as the head coach there, said he was less worried about what it says on the scoreboard and more worried about how it looks on the floor.

“If they smell blood, it can get ugly in a hurry,” Ballard said of the Jayhawks. “I’m confident in my team. But just showing up, that’s not it. You have to go compete, play hard and leave it all on the floor. We’ve talked a lot about how you prepare and execute and how mentally tough you can be. If you do those things, the score will take care of itself.”

For Ballard personally, the opportunity to coach in a place so near and dear to his heart is one that he said he had to go through first to really be able to reflect on it.

But that does not mean he’s not looking forward to it.

“For a Kansas kid, it’s just an unbelievable opportunity,” said Ballard, a native of Hutchinson. “All of those things I’ve done there were experiences that obviously changed my life. It’s unbelievable. And now, here I am today and I get to go coach a game in the greatest venue in college basketball. How many people can say that?”