photo by: Nick Krug

Team manager Chris Huey gets up to celebrate a Jayhawk bucket during the second half, Saturday, Feb. 21, 2015 at Allen Fieldhouse. Huey suited up as a walk on for the game.

New York — Former KU basketball manager, Chris Huey, is a little more than a day away from facing the Jayhawks for the first time.

Now in his sixth season with St. John’s basketball, Huey, as the Red Storm’s director of basketball operations, has had a significant role in helping SJU (5-1) prepare for its Friday night matchup with Kansas at 6 p.m. at UBS Arena in Elmont, N.Y.

The Journal-World caught up with Huey in New York on Wednesday afternoon, and he said the upcoming meeting is a “mixture of surreal and strange.”

There were, Huey said, a couple of texts and phone calls with KU staff members Norm Roberts and Fred Quartlebaum.

“Talking smack leading up to the game,” was the way Huey described it. But those types of interactions are far from rare. He said he communicates with several members of the KU staff on a regular basis.

“I consider most of that staff as some of my biggest mentors in basketball,” he said.

That includes KU coach Bill Self, whom Huey said he owes “my whole foundation to him.”

“Seeing how to work in the profession, that was the biggest thing I learned from him,” Huey said of Self. “How he runs a program, how he treats people.

In addition to lessons about scouting reports, Xs and Os, building relationships and recruiting, Self provided Huey with a moment that he called “one of the highlights of my life.”

The moment came in late February of 2015, when Huey, a 2014 KU grad, was in his senior year as a KU basketball manager. Two days before the Jayhawks’ home game against TCU, Self informed him that he would be suiting up for the game.

Whether he would play or not remained in question and was dependent largely on how the eighth-ranked Jayhawks fared. But with a lead large enough, Huey checked in for the game’s final minute and attempted one shot. It missed, but it hardly mattered. The experience of wearing the uniform and playing in a real game was enough for the Kansas City, Kan., native.

Officially, he played 35 seconds. Self, Huey said, remembers it a little differently.

“I saw him at a recruiting event this summer and we were sitting by each other and he told another guy we were sitting with the story of how I played in that game,” Huey said. “He embellished it a little to say I was the only player he’d ever coached who got up three shots in a minute, but we had a good laugh over that.”