How Honor Huff Grew from an Undersized Kid in Brooklyn to a Star in Chattanooga
From Brooklyn, NY to the barracks of VMI and eventually to UTC, Huff has learned hard work and loyalty--virtues that will make him successful after basketball.
On a normal day at a park in Brooklyn, NY, Honor Huff’s father, Carlton, decided to switch things up. Huff, just 10 years old at the time, stood on the sidelines waiting for his dad to call next, build a team, and send him into the fiery competition of a pick-up basketball game in New York. Instead, the elder Huff looked at his son and gave him a new set of instructions.
“I want you to go over there and call next,” Carlton said. “I want you to assert yourself; tell them you have next, pick your own team, and if they say no, tell them you’ll play one-on-one for it.”
Huff looked up at his dad, petrified. It was a group of teenagers playing—maybe four or five years older—and to a 10-year-old, the task of standing up to high schoolers is a death sentence.
“No,” Huff said. “I can’t do it.”
“I’m not playing with you,” Carlton said. “You want to play, right? Go tell them you have next. I can’t do that [for you] anymore.”
Huff never went. The daunting challenge sent him home for the day, unable to get his daily hoops in. It was a moment that’s stuck with him every day since.
“He said, ‘You can’t be a coward all your life in anything—not just in basketball—you can’t be scared to assert yourself and be confident,’” a now 21-year-old Huff said. “I’ve really thought about that from that moment on. He’s right; I can’t always be scared to put myself in uncomfortable situations. I never let anybody buck me from my next ever again.”
It’s a lesson Huff has taken with him everywhere—out of Brooklyn to four different high schools in Pennsylvania. To the cold, foreboding barracks of Virginia Military Institute and finally to Chattanooga, where the undersized guard has blossomed into a confident and outgoing star for the Mocs.
“Being brought up [in Brooklyn] was huge in my development, not even on the court but how I am off it,” Huff said. “My infectious personality, my outgoingness—in New York, you can’t be shy in the corner; that’s not how it works. I appreciate how I came up.”
Every day, he’d run home from school, drop off his bag, and go straight to the park. That’s just what kids do in New York—it's the Mecca of Basketball. The hoops that take place on those courts have produced some of the best players in the world, and everyone wants to be next.
Big, small, clumsy, skilled, loud—it doesn’t matter; everybody wants to play, so you have to keep up with the level of competition. The big guys can get away with physical play to win games and stay on the court. Four-foot-something Honor Huff? He had to be able to hoop.
“It’s blood,” Huff said. “In New York, you’re not playing if you’re not a certain age. It gets that deep. Maybe you’re skilled enough but you’re not ready to handle the physicality of how they play—they're throwing elbows and all that stuff. It’s really what you hear about. You have to bring a certain level of toughness. When I was little, the skill gap at my size was so much better than everybody else. People thought I was going to the NBA...obviously the game catches up to you.”
Huff lived in Brooklyn with his mother for 15 years, seeing his father only once every other month. Some days, Carlton would sneak over to Huff’s school to squeeze in an extra chance to see his son. Eventually, Carlton moved to Pennsylvania and Huff didn’t see him as much anymore. They’d have the occasional weekend where the father would make the drive to Brooklyn just to turn around and spend a few days in Pennsylvania.
Before Huff started high school, his mother, Abigail Liddell, made an important sacrifice.
She decided it would be best for him to move to Pennsylvania with his father. He was a growing young man and she wanted him to be able to learn those things from his father, while also hoping the best for his basketball career by sending him to Carlton, who played college basketball at Long Island University.
High school was a whirlwind for Huff, who played on his school’s freshman team as an eighth grader in Brooklyn. When he got to Bethlehem Catholic in Pennsylvania, Carlton wanted him to stay on the freshman team. The coach had different ideas.
“We were losing [in Brooklyn], but I would score 30,” Huff said. “He was like, ‘Now, I want you to win. I want you to lead the team to winning, do what you do, and keep progressing.’ The coach wanted me to play Junior Varsity and Varsity as a freshman, but my dad said no.”
The coach ended up using him on JV and Varsity, much to Carlton’s frustration. In the first game, Huff sat the bench on JV but was still the only one to leave early to suit up for varsity, where he still didn’t touch the floor.
The next gameday, Huff had his duffel bag packed and ready to go when he saw his father storming through the hallway.
“We’re out,” Carlton said. “We’re not doing this. I told him you wanted to play freshman and he’s messing with you right now. He knows you’re better than everybody and you’re the only one on varsity. We’re not doing that; let’s go.”
Huff was disenrolled from Bethlehem Catholic the next day and moved to Executive Education Academy Charter School, which didn’t have a basketball team, allowing him to play for nearby Dieruff High. The 5-foot-1 freshman finished the year averaging 20 points on JV while providing an offensive sparkplug for the varsity team.
He played at Dieruff again through his sophomore year, and when Executive formed its own basketball team, Huff had to make a decision.
“We were thinking about going to Perkiomen [School] that year,” he said. “My dad was like, ‘Nah, I want you to stay at Dieruff. I want you to lead them to wins and blossom into a confident player.’ I wasn’t as confident before that year, so everything my dad told me—he's led me down the right path.”
Dieruff went 3-19 that year.
“The winning part didn’t come out of that,” Huff said. “I averaged like 24 [points], and it was good for my confidence. It was good to know I can hoop—I'd known that—but then it was like, ‘I can hoop for real.’”
After that year, Carlton decided it was time to make the move to Perkiomen. Huff wasn’t hearing from schools at any level, and that had to change.
One of the coaches at Perkiomen had seen one of Huff’s 30-point explosions earlier in the season, and when they called asking if he wanted to play at the prep level, the answer was immediate. He reclassified, doing his junior year over again and moved off to boarding school.
With five post-graduate players on the team, Huff came off the bench as a junior—still leading the team in scoring. The Perkiomen coaches used him as an offensive weapon and told him not to worry about anything else.
Huff picked up his first Division I offer during his junior season—sort of. After a 36-point outing, Central Connecticut State called, wanting Huff to join its team as soon as possible. The call went to Carlton, with Huff still under 18, and the father told CCSU his son’s dream school was Syracuse, so he didn’t know how interested they were.
Central Connecticut State never called back. Luckily, other offers were starting to roll in.
Perkiomen lost to Westtown—a team with Jalen Warley and Dereck Lively II—in the state semifinals. Shortly after, COVID hit.
During lockdown, the Huffs decided it was time to put some weight on Honor.
“That summer was brutal,” he said. “Three times a day, working out, waking up at 6 AM, it was brutal. But I got my weight from 135 to 150. So senior year, my coaches told me they needed me to do everything now. Our top seven [guys] were D-I that year and we went undefeated.”
COVID took away Perkiomen’s chance to win a state championship, ending Huff’s high school career. After committing to VMI in December, he was set to head to Lexington, Virginia in the fall.
But the cold feet kicked harder than senioritis.
Three weeks before school ended, Huff was sitting in entrepreneurship class. He’d never visited VMI and wanted to do some research. Scrolling through his phone, he saw the barracks, the military lifestyle, and came to a realization: “I can’t do this.”
He went back through his phone, looking for the previous interest he’d received from other schools, eventually finding Colgate. He shot off a quick email to coach Matt Langel.
“Hey Coach, I’m committed to VMI; I don’t think it’s the right place for me,” it read. “I’m getting cold feet. I just wanted to know if you were still interested in me. Here’s my film again just in case you forgot.”
The bell rings and Huff heads to lunch when his phone rings. It was Ander Galfsky, an assistant coach at VMI.
“Galfsky was like, ‘What’s up? How are you doing?’ He started off cool,” Huff said. “I was like ‘I’m good, I’m just leaving class.’ Then he was like, ‘Did you send an email to Matt Langel like 20 minutes ago, saying you want to go to Colgate?’”
Langel is good friends with Dan Earl, VMI’s head coach at the time, and had forwarded the email straight to him. Huff panicked, saying maybe it was an email from months ago. When Galfsky didn’t buy it, Huff hung up the phone.
He went to Perkiomen coach Thomas Baudinet, knowing he’d screwed up. Dribbling a ball to calm his nerves, he confessed his mistake. Baudinet furiously snatched the ball, threw it across the gym, and got in Huff’s face, demanding to know what was going through his head.
“[This is] my fault, Coach [Galfsky],” Huff said. “It’s not you guys, it’s just the military part that kind of scared me. I made a rash decision and I’m sorry about that.” He sent a long paragraph to Earl, waiting to hear from him, and headed back to visit his mother in New York for a weekend.
Eventually, Earl called, saying they would still take Huff, they just couldn’t afford to make mistakes like that. So, just as planned, Huff headed to VMI, which was the best and worst experience of his life.
“First day, they cut my hair; I’m already crying,” Huff said. “I had more hair than I have now, and they just cut it. We got to hell week—I don’t wish hell week on my worst enemy. Waking up at 4 AM to guns shooting in the air and knocks at my door. It was the worst experience. On Wednesday, you got a chance to call home. I called my dad and said, ‘Come get me.’ He said, ‘No. If you leave here, where are you going to go? You have a full scholarship; you have to see it through.”
As a freshman at VMI, you’re nothing more than a rat. As an athlete, you’re seen as privileged and not fully committed. Life for someone who’s both a rat and an athlete is brutal. The basketball rats had weekly meetings, sitting on the court to discuss how the last few days had been. They’d cry to each other, still adjusting to the life of a VMI Keydet.
Stain on your shirt? Demerit. Not walking in a straight line? Demerit. Cutting across the grass? Demerit. Each demerit has to be worked off with Physical Training: one lap around the campus, in a straight line, holding a 13-pound rifle.
Halloween of his freshman year, confinement couldn’t hold a 19-year-old Honor Huff. Despite his roommate and best friend Cooper Sisco electing to stay home, he wanted to go to a party at James Madison University. He went, had a good time, and came back—no harm, no foul.
Except for one little post on Instagram.
Days later, he got a knock on his door and was greeted with a pink slip: an invitation to go see the commandant. When meeting the officer, rats must be accompanied by their dyke—a military term for big brother. Huff had to go knock on another door and a towering seven-footer answered.
Jake Stephens couldn’t help but laugh. “At least I don’t have to go to these anymore.” he said.
The commandant gave Huff 90 weeks of confinement, 100 demerits, and 90 PTs. The first game of Huff’s college career was still a week away and he was already set for punishment through his junior year. So after a successful freshman year in which Huff averaged 10 points and was voted to the All-SoCon Freshman Team, he was excited when Dan Earl accepted the head coaching job at Chattanooga—it was his ticket out.
“[Coach Earl] had been recruiting me since my junior year of high school,” Huff said. “Everything he said I was going to do—All-freshman team, starting—he followed through.”
Although the year at VMI had been tough, it taught him lessons of persistence, loyalty, and respect. He was a better person for it, and he wouldn’t turn his back on those that believed in him again.
“I’m super appreciative of him electing to come with us,” Earl said. “Particularly in this day and age, when everybody’s looking at the next best thing, he had that loyalty and said, ‘You guys took a chance on me early’ and we try to treat him the right way. There might be bigger or better at some places, and there’s days where he’s probably annoyed with me or I push him a little, but [overall], I think he appreciates our relationship...I’m super appreciative and just love him; he’s a great guy to coach.”
Huff sat out all of 2022-23 at Chattanooga because of the Southern Conference’s undergraduate intra-conference transfer rule for. He watched as Stephens led the Mocs to the SoCon championship game, where they fell short against Furman.
He took the year to work on his game and, with hindsight, believes it’s benefited him more than playing would have.
“It was kind of like me reclassifying in high school,” Huff said. “It gave me some breathing room to elevate my game to the next level. Physically, I was able to gain weight again, getting up to about 160 [pounds]. Getting in the gym, working on my handle and all the other things you see on the court. Now, I can start my master's [degree] for free, which is big too.”
This year, Huff averaged 17.4 points and was voted to the All-SoCon second team, but UTC fell short in the semifinals against ETSU. The Mocs are bringing back him and Trey Bonham next year and are looking to reload to make a run for a SoCon title.
“This is my NBA,” Huff said. “This is it for me playing competitively. This is what I envisioned when I was a kid—playing Division I basketball.”
He sees himself on TV one day, debating sports with colleagues, using Stephen A. Smith as an example.
“I want to argue with him,” he said. “I want to sit down and half a debate with him before he retires. I talk a lot; I’m very passionate about what I care about, and I can think on the go—I think that’s perfect for what he does. That’s always what I’ve wanted to do.”
Maybe you’ll flip on ESPN one day and Huff and Stephen A., two New Yorkers, will be screaming at each other about Kyrie Irving’s legacy. But for now, Huff is just focused on his NBA and soon, his MBA. With two years of eligibility left, he has a chance to leave his mark on the Southern Conference.
Honor Huff’s got next, and he’s still not letting anybody take that from him.