Derrick Williams says he brings “Ray Lewis on offense” when he plays the game of football. When the Greenbelt (Md.) Eleanor Roosevelt quarterback, wide receiver, and defensive back says that it can grab one’s attention.
Off the field, Williams is an intelligent, humble, and heady young man. He really does not mean to brag, but he is very competitive, wants the best out of his team, wants the best out of himself, a guy that never gives up, and a guy that plays with all his heart and leaves everything on the field.
Certainly, it is a story told by football players throughout the country, minus the lofty goals set before him after being pegged as the preseason national player of the year. However, Williams is a unique player with a unique past.
Williams is not playing in the U.S. Army All-American Bowl because he already has enrolled at Penn State, but is one of the five finalists for the associated Ball Park National High School Player of the Year award.
It has been a long time since Derrick first remembers getting beat up in practice while playing in seven on seven drills. Never the biggest player on the field, Williams had to rely on his running abilities and escapability to run around the tough opponents.
Derrick started playing football at the age of six in the Upper Marlboro Boys and Girls club. Derrick played for his father at linebacker and wide receiver, though he wanted to focus on playing quarterback.
“One of the things I taught all the kids that I had was to not just focus in on one position, but to have several positions,” Dwight Williams, Derrick’s father, says. “We won the championship at 70 pounds, at 85 pounds, and we won it at 110. He played that all the way up until he was fifteen, so nine years.”
People began to look up to Derrick once he hit the field as a high school player. A tough player on both offense and defense, he wanted to give all that he had on every play, every down. That, he says, is the best way to earn respect and to lead a team in battle.
“Since I was a kid, I’ve been playing a lot of positions. In my little league, I played linebacker in quarterback,” says Derrick. “In high school, I started playing defensive back, quarterback, and receiver. I carry that mentality even on the defensive side, but I love offense.”
The youth league was the time when Williams formed the foundation of playmaking that would eventually lead to becoming the top football prospect in the nation. Pushing the young man, Dwight became an integral role in training not only Derrick, but also older brother Domonique. Dwight himself was a collegiate football player when he was at Langston University in Oklahoma City (Ok.). The brothers themselves had a dream to play in college like their father, and he certainly went out of his way to help them.
“The major thing that I believe that helped both Domonique and Derrick is that I never let them sit around the house; I always got them up early in the morning,” he remembers. “When I was training Domonique, they would go up to the University of Maryland and run the steps. So many folks remember that and recall that Derrick was so small and he was trying to run the steps, and eventually he would start to actually run the steps. That was one of our routines, that we would go and have some type of activity, because I knew that if we got his speed right, that in any other sport he participated in, he would always do quite well.”
It turned out that sport was the same for both brothers, and they both ran on the track teams at the Boys and Girls Club.
During this foundation, an eleven-year-old Derrick Williams would follow Domonique to practice and to neighborhood games to compete with the older players.
“When my brother had practice, I would always be there,” says Derrick. “When they would run practice, they would let me play with them. I was getting beat up, but I was getting used to playing with people older than me. So when it was my turn, it just felt like it was a cakewalk.”
“Derrick would always be the small kid that would go around with the old kids,” says Derrick’s father, Dwight Williams, who has played an integral role in the learning process. Domonique was one of the major guys in the neighborhood, and everybody knew him. Sometimes we would be short on the players, so Derrick would always come in. Domonique would just say throw the ball, and wherever Derrick threw it, Domonique would catch it. A lot of times Derrick used to come home crying because the kids were so much bigger and they would rough him up some.”
The learning process at that point began. The first person from which he learned was Domonique, a Superprep All-American, and rated as the number seventeen overall prospect in the nation by one magazine in 1997 coming out of Gwynn Park High School in Maryland. His senior season, Domonique set career school records include most touchdowns (45), most total yards (4,227), most rushing yards (2,589 while also earning all-state honors at defensive back. Domonique had a wide variety of choices, and the scrutiny around him is something Derrick looked up to.
“I learned many things, like how the coaches were going to want to call, and how the newspaper were going to want stories,” says Derrick. “When I was a kid, that’s what I looked out for, too. That’s when I really wanted to be as good as I could be, when I saw my brother going through all of that. It seemed that everybody thought he was everything.
“I knew that I was going to be kind of special when my brother was going through it, because everybody was like ‘You haven’t seen his little brother play yet.’”
Domonique’s college choice was North Carolina, and he would return home to help teach the youth football players in the area, including his younger brother.
“(Domonique) took a lot of the kids that I had, and he worked with them on some of the techniques that he would get from high school and from the college,” Dwight added. “So they were picking up college techniques when they were only in the Boys and Girls Club, and we lived by those things. I remember Domonique had taught the kids how to get over the bag and not look at your feet while doing that, and we started doing those things every day. That really helped Derrick out a lot because a lot of the things we were doing, when Derrick went to the camps, he was really prepared. Camps are so easy for us, and I guess that is where a lot of people observed how he went through drills and running the forty yard dash.”
Those college camps were the brothers’ “treats for the year”. As was the norm, Derrick would work with the older age groups thanks to his advanced teachings.
The camps helped Derrick tremendously, not only because it continued the influx of new knowledge about the game he loved so much, but a new face entered the Williams’ lives – future head coach Rick Houchens.
“When Coach Rick got hired at Roosevelt, he used to go to a lot of camps. We were at the Maryland camp, where they hired him to work at the camp, and Rick coached Derrick,” says Dwight. “It was just camp after camp, and both Rick and I had both decided that Derrick would go to Roosevelt. The academic standards of Roosevelt is one of the best in this area, it is very diverse.”
Derrick began working hard while at Eleanor Roosevelt High School.
"In seven years as head coach, I have placed 92 players in college and three players currently in the NFL," says head coach Rick Houchens. "In all my years and all of my players that I have been blessed to work with, Derrick Williams is without a doubt the greatest player that I have not only coached but also seen in my ten year high school coaching career.
"Every time he touches the ball he is either throwing for a touchdown or running for one. On defense at corner he’s making picks and scoring on them. On punt returns, which he never did before this year, he’s scoring on them. As a sophomore at receiver he takes a slip screen and just runs away from everyone for 58 yards. He’s that blessed of an athlete that if you leave your seat at any moment you might miss a spectacular play. I’ve had to send out 68 tapes on that kid."
Other players noted Derrick’s hard work and his older brother’s background with recruiting. Former teammate and close friend Derrick Harvey paid close attention to Williams. Harvey entered only his second year of playing football, but he, too, was named as one of the top players in the nation. Eventually signing with Florida this spring, Williams says Harvey asked more about the recruiting process than the other way around.
“With Derrick, I think he learned more from me because of the fact that my brother was highly recruited,” says Williams. “My brother would talk to both of us and I think that it was more and more both of us learning at the same time.”
While learning from Domonique, Derrick says that behind that dedication, determination, and drive to be the best player in the nation is someone close to Derrick’s heart, his father.
“My mentor has to be my dad. He has been working out my whole life. I give every credit to him. He is the best person in my life besides God. He’s the man that took care of me. He worked me out when I needed to be, when nobody else was doing anything.”
For that drive and dedication, the entire Williams family has been rewarded. People love to use comparisons, saying a player is the next Randy Moss or the next Barry Sanders. Everyone watching Derrick Williams sits in awe and attempts to figure out with whom his playing style matches. With the great players like Derrick Williams, the only comparison is with themselves.
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