WOMEN’S VOLLEYBALL NCAA WEST REGIONAL : UCLA’s Williams Takes Game to a Higher Level

When Andy Banachowski ran across Natalie Williams, she was playing volleyball in a club tournament up north. She was leaps and bounds ahead of most of the players in athletic ability, but the UCLA women’s volleyball coach was not particularly interested.

After all, from what he had heard, Williams was going to concentrate on basketball after graduating from high school in Utah.

“I knew she was a great athlete, but I had heard she was a basketball player, and that she was going to play basketball in college and not really concentrate on volleyball, so we didn’t really pursue her too much early on,” said Banachowski, whose top-ranked Bruins will be the host team in the NCAA West Regional beginning tonight.

Indeed, Williams was a basketball player. She averaged 30 points and 17 rebounds a game at Utah’s Taylorsville High. She was contacted by such women’s basketball powerhouses as Tennessee and Louisiana Tech.

And basketball was part of her heritage, her father Nate having played several seasons in the NBA.

“I never lived with him,” Williams said of her father. “But I guess I just got the genes.”

But Williams had also played some volleyball, well enough that she became a high school All-American in her senior year, in both sports. And by then, she was begining to lean more toward volleyball, since her coaches were expressing the likelihood of a brighter future for her in the sport that she plays above the net, than the one that she plays under it.

Senior Daiva Tomkus, the Bruins’ standout middle blocker, remembers hearing about Williams’ exploits in the various summer volleyball tournaments.

“I just kept hearing stories about when she played club ball, how she would just literally destroy other teams,” Tomkus said. “She jumped so high and was so powerful. I remember hearing different club girls telling me how threatened they were by her.”

She was one of only two high school players invited to train with the U.S. national team. The other is Chula Vista Palomar High’s Keba Phipps, who is still with the team, training in San Diego.

Williams, who could have stayed with the team, chose college instead, citing the desire for an education and preferences for “more experience and (a chance) to play with people my own age.”

She was soon contacted by Stanford and Hawaii, and as she says, “all the major schools.” UCLA was one of them, but it wasn’t high on her list.

But Banachowski wound up with Williams anyway, courtesy of cross-town rival USC.

On a recruiting trip to USC’s mid-city campus, Williams was taken by Coach Chuck Erbe to a match against UCLA, on the Westwood campus. It proved to be a mistake by Erbe.

“After I saw the campus and the gym and everything (at UCLA), I decided I wanted to take a trip here. I just loved everything and I knew this was the place I wanted to go,” Williams said.

A 19-year-old freshman, Williams is one of the reasons UCLA is the nation’s top-ranked team going into tonight’s Pauley Pavilion matchup at 6:30 against Arizona (18-12).

The Bruins are 28-2 and, according to Banachowski, “Natalie has been a big part of helping us have a great year . . . that’s for sure.”

She finished second in freshman-of-the-year voting to Bev Oden of No. 8 Stanford (18-11), which plays unranked Wyoming (23-6), tonight at 8:30 in the other West Regional game.

Williams is hitting a phenomenal .329, a feat not accomplished by many freshmen at any school. She is second in that category to Tomkus. Williams is among only three Bruins who have had 700 total attempts, joining All-Americans Tomkus and sophomore Elaine Youngs, who along with Williams were selected to the first-team All-Pacific 10 team. Williams has 364 kills, second only to Tomkus.

Standing 6-feet-1, Williams can jump and touch at 10-7, five inches higher than Tomkus or Youngs.

“It still amazes me, even at this stage, that she can do that,” marveled Banachowski, in his 23rd year at UCLA. “That just puts her on a different level, as far as being able to play at a height above the net that other players can’t.”