Brian Lewis

Matt Wolff, Herington senior, is a manager for the Kansas men’s basketball team. He has been a manager for two years and hopes to become a basketball coach in the future.

Matt Wolff sits down on a leather couch in the Kansas men’s basketball team’s video room deep within Allen Fieldhouse. He is wearing a Nike Kansas sweater and wind pants and is taking a break from setting up for the Kansas home game against Missouri that will be taking place in a few hours.

An assistant coach walks by and reminds him that he needs to take equipment to the court. Wolff smiles and nods. He’s used to this by now.

“I’m starting to put in 50 to 55 hours a week,” he said. “It’s hard work, and I put in a lot of long hours.

He doesn’t mind the work because the job is an opportunity to work with Kansas basketball, he said.

Wolff, a fifth-year senior from Herington, is a manager for the No. 3 Jayhawks. This is his second year on the job, and he’s taking a similar path to fulfilling his dream of becoming a basketball coach that Bill Self took.

In 1996 former Kansas coach Larry Brown told Self, when he worked a summer camp for him, that if he could ever help him out to let him know. Self then called Brown and asked if he could work as his graduate assistant.

“We all know that story. The people you meet is one of the biggest things about this job,” Wolff said. “I meet people from ESPN and other coaches. The networking is great for this job.”

Wolff worked his way up the ladder to earn his manager status with the team. His high school basketball coach used to be head manager at Kansas and helped him get in contact with former coach Ben Miller. For his first three years of college he worked at summer camps and showed enough effort to be promoted to team manager.

Now Wolff does everything from helping out administrative assistant Brett Ballard and director of basketball operations Danny Manning in the office to washing the team’s laundry and getting needed items out for the trainer at practice. During practice he sometimes helps pass and rebound for drills.

“Matt has a great understanding of basketball and helps out a lot in practice,” Ballard said. “He knows how to guard and rebound, and it makes the drills we run that much better.”

Wolff said the easiest part of his job was working games. His duties include giving players water and acting as gophers for the coaches, which means he is at the coaches’ every request during games.

Road trips are the hardest part of the job, he said.

“On the road we’re in charge of all the equipment,” Wolff said. “If we lose anything, we get in trouble.”

It’s those types of responsibilities that make the job worthwhile for him. He is on a first-name basis with all the coaches and players and is treated as an assistant coach.

“The head coach realizes how much the managers help, and he treats them with respect,” Ballard said. “The seniors on this team really appreciate it too and understand they are part of the team.”

Wolff sits behind the Kansas bench at every men’s basketball game and basks in the luxury of traveling on the team’s charter jet. His face is shown on television so often that he’s practically a public figure in his hometown.

“I don’t know about being the envy of the town,” he laughed. “I know a lot of people tell my dad and mom that they saw their son on TV. Most people probably look at it as prestigious.”

He indicated that people in Lawrence also recognize him, but not to the same extent as in Herington. And here people don’t really care about what he does for the team, he said. They want to find out all the inside information he has.

“If I go out with my girlfriend and her friends, I almost don’t want to tell them what I do, because then I get the 50 questions,” he said. “They’ll start asking me, ‘what does J.R. Giddens eat for breakfast,’ or ‘what is Bill Self’s house like?’ Stuff like that, which has no relation to basketball.”

Still, Wolff loves his job. He said it had made him more focused in his classes and given him real-life experience that he could never get anywhere else. Just watching Self run the team has taught him enough that he would feel comfortable coaching if he had to do it tomorrow, he said.

“Everything I know about college basketball, I know from him,” Wolff said. “This job helps you learn the inner workings of a big-time sports environment. In Kansas, it doesn’t get any bigger than Kansas basketball.”