http://www.registercitizen.com/site/news.cfm?newsid=20020417&BRD=1652&PAG=461&dept_id=464186&rfi=6Early lessons still paying off for Jordan WilliamsBy: PETER WALLACE, Register Citizen Staff
08/16/2008
MIC NICOSIA/Register Citizen The Williams family: Leron, Dee and son Jordan.
When Jordan Williams was a 5-foot-9 sixth grader - head and shoulders taller than his classmates - his father, 6-foot-8 Leron Williams, showed no mercy in their driveway pickup basketball games.
"I'd get hammered by him or my brother and I'd never get the call," Jordan laughs now.
"It would get to be too much for him and he'd finally run into the house crying," smiles his mother, Dee Williams.
Cruel? Forget about it.
"I told him, 'You're going to get bigger and they're not going to call it,'" Leron explained.
Now, crowding 6-feet-10 as a Torrington High School senior, sure enough, the whistle often goes against Williams, his fault or not, when he makes contact with a smaller player.
But as skills and toughness take him to higher venues, he's less likely to be the biggest player on the court.
This summer Jordan played with a 17-and-under AAU team based in Boston, the New England Playaz, against some of the best and biggest pre-college players in the country.
And he thrived.
Premier recruiting source Rivals.Com said this on its web site on August 11: "Coming into July, the name Jordan Williams wasn't very high on many people's radar. That, however, would change in a big way when he performed extremely well in Las Vegas and Los Angeles for the New England Playaz. Now Williams is one of the most highly recruited big men in the 2009 class."
Fordham, Maryland, Massachusetts, Notre Dame, Providence, Rhode Island, St. John's and Xavier are on the growing list of name-brand colleges offering scholarships so far; UConn, Georgetown, Marquette, Pittsburgh and Wake Forest are among dozens of others showing interest.For the Williams family, it's both an old and a new story.
Leron grew up with four brothers and a sister.
"You always had a ball in your hand, whether it was a football, baseball or basketball," he said. "We competed about everything, including who was going to be at the dinner table first.
"For me, basketball was an afterthought; baseball came first. I didn't play basketball until high school. I played because I was tall and (Torrington High School) coach Joe Haberl said, 'You're playing.'"
Still, following in older brother Rene's 6-foot-5 footsteps, Leron had offers to play in Hawaii, Monmouth University and Long Beach State. Rene played at Keene State in New Hampshire.
"I was a big momma's boy," laughed Leron, who stayed home to play at Housatonic Community College.
Murray, 6-feet-6-inches, was the next Williams brother to blaze a basketball trail.
"He was the best; he did everything," says Dee.
Records at Torrington High School agree, making Murray one of coach Jim Calhoun's first in-state recruits at UConn.
He became a Husky the year Jordan was born.
"I started playing when I was three, but I didn't know what it was to be in a basketball family," said Jordan.
Like the older Williams brothers, it wasn't just basketball (Jordan played soccer for six years), but he was always big.
"He was a goalie, and I remember the expressions on the other team's faces," Leron said. "We had to carry a birth certificate to prove he was 9 or 10."
There were also penalties.
"I was always bigger and stronger than my friends, so when I tried to horse around like they did, I'd end up hurting people," Jordan remembered.
"People expect him to act older than he is," says Dee.
Ah, but the basketball rewards.
Jordan played in the 5th and 6th grade Elks basketball program when he was in third grade and helped his team win a championship. Talented younger brother Desmond (16), played in the same program when he was in second grade, and opposing coaches made his coaching father play Desmond with the starters.
As a freshman at Torrington, Jordan had a stress fracture in his foot for the first half of the season, then helped his team win the Division II state championship when it healed. As a sophomore, Williams led the Red Raiders to within five points of eventual Class LL state champion Hillhouse in a semifinal loss. Last year, as a junior, a three-point buzzer beater by eventual finalist Trinity Catholic took the Raiders out in the Class LL second round.
Last summer, at the request of the Playaz' director, Williams joined the 16-and-under team, sometimes moving up to the 17-and-unders.
"I was the best 16 center in the country because the better ones were playing on the 17 teams," Jordan said.
This summer, he moved up to the A level. The 17-and-under Playaz, based in Boston, are one of eight AAU teams in the country sponsored entirely by Adidas.
With only six losses through 50 games in 20 tournaments from April through Aug. 1, they were ranked among the top five teams in the East.
But it wasn't always great for Jordan
"I played terribly in April, because I wasn't used to the level of competition," says Williams. "I even thought about switching teams because I wasn't doing anybody any good and it was just making me look bad."
In some ways, he was back in the driveway with his father.
But just like then, Williams stuck with it. In June, he played well in the Bob Gibbons Tournament of Champions in North Carolina. That bolstered his confidence for consistently good play in Cincinnati, Georgia and South Carolina.
How good? Six-foot-9, 220-pound Derrick Favors, who plays for the 17-and-under Atlanta Celtics AAU team, is considered the top power forward recruit in the country.
"He's a shot-blocker and a rebounder," said Williams. In Atlanta, Williams, playing head-to-head against Favors at power forward, matched him with six points apiece, and Williams, not Favors, came down with 10 rebounds.
"The coaches said Jordan outshined him," Dee smiled.
The Playaz own coach should know. He's John Carroll, interim coach for the real Celtics before Doc Rivers came on board.
By the time Williams got to the 18 games in nine days of the biggest tournaments of the summer, at Los Angeles and Las Vegas, his confidence hummed.
"Against players like this, you have to play a lot harder," he said. "Here (in Torrington), I can get away with stuff because I'm bigger; there, I can be one of the shortest players."
That driveway again, and its benefits.
"I'd be in the house, thinking of how I was going to trick (dad) the next day," Williams grins.
In Las Vegas, the "tricks" were worth 33-35 points, and, for the first time, interviews after the games by web sites and scouts. Jordan Williams was suddenly a hot prospect, helping his team to the quarterfinals among 64 teams composed of the best high school players in the country.
Back when he was a freshman, Williams got his first recruiting letter, from Fairfield University.
"I just stared at it for 20 minutes," says Williams.
Now he has six size-18 shoeboxes full of letters that Dee thinks she should go through and organize sometime.
Except that now, since Aug. 1, NCAA rules permit coaches to call on the phone twice a week.
The phone doesn't stop ringing, including a call from Morehead State during this interview.
"I got a call from (Maryland coach) Gary Williams and, for a minute, I thought it was one of my friends joking with me," said Leron, still sort of amazed that the guy he used to stuff so easily in the driveway - for his own good - is now so sought after, at least partially as a result.
