Double Teamed : Mater Dei’s Williams Will Play Football at Notre Dame, but He Really Loves Basketball

Now that he has signed a letter of intent to play football at Notre Dame, the real story can be told.

Consensus prep All-American defensive lineman Brad Williams, all 6 feet 5, 265 pounds of him, sees himself as a basketball player first.

Williams is the starting center for the top-ranked boys’ basketball team at Mater Dei, and though he is a prized recruit of the Fighting Irish’s football team because of his bone-jarring tackles, he has quietly established himself on the basketball court as one of the area’s more effective post players.

There are certainly more highly touted big men around the county, slamming and jamming their way into the headlines, but Williams gets the job done.

“He’s doing a great job for us,” Monarch Coach Gary McKnight said. “Here’s a kid that didn’t even play on the team last year. He’s awfully agile for a big guy and he’s a very good passer. He does a great job for us in the high post, receiving the ball and passing down to the low post. He’s shooting pretty good now too.”

Williams averages only six points, but he leads the team in rebounds (five per game). He has started every game on an injury-riddled team that finally got its entire starting five together for the first time this season in Wednesday’s 74-45 shellacking of Capistrano Valley. Williams shared high-scoring honors with 13 points.

“I’m having tons of fun,” Williams said. “We’re having a great year and when we get everybody together on the floor at the same time, we’re going to be great.”

Williams never touched a football until his freshman year at El Modena High in 1992. Friends convinced him he might like it. Though Williams was skeptical, he earned starting jobs on the freshman team as an outside linebacker and tight end.

Still, Williams saw basketball in his future. He played for years on a traveling club team that twice won national age-group titles. Several of his teammates on that team, including guard David Castleton, attended Mater Dei.

“I practiced basketball all my life,” Williams said. “In grade school, I was always a head taller than my classmates. I thought of myself as a basketball player.”

The future for Williams changed drastically before the end of his freshman year. The Orange Unified School District, beset with financial problems, considered drastic budget cutbacks, including teacher layoffs, cutting coaching stipends and increases in class sizes of up to 40 students. Worse, El Modena football Coach Bill Backstrom resigned.

John and Brenda Williams, Brad’s parents, didn’t like what they saw. They decided to find another place for Brad to go to school.

“There was no real plan to go to Mater Dei,” Brenda Williams said. “Things just went berserk at El Modena and we knew we had to do something. We didn’t really want to leave. Brad’s two sisters graduated from El Modena.”

They settled on Mater Dei, in part, according to John Williams, because Brad would have a chance to play football and basketball with Castleton, whom he had known since the fifth grade.

But the Williams did not realize that, according to Southern Section rules, Brad would have to sit out his sophomore year at Mater Dei because the family maintained its residency.

It didn’t take Williams long to establish himself as a promising football lineman in 1994, though basketball was still foremost in his mind. He was a starter for the Monarchs, who defeated La Puente Bishop Amat, 28-21, to win the Southern Section Division I football title.

Williams looked forward to basketball season, but he cracked a small bone in his foot in the last regular-season football game. He continued to play throughout the playoffs, but by the time basketball season rolled around, the pain was too intense to enable him to play.

Last spring, Williams concentrated on football for the first time, lifting weights and running. By the start of fall practice, he was recognized by several publications as one of the top players in the nation. However, the Monarchs’ season ended two weeks earlier last fall, when they were defeated in the second round of the playoffs by Los Alamitos.

That’s when McKnight, whose basketball team was beset by injuries, came looking for Williams. Castleton, who played football and basketball, was recovering from a broken collarbone suffered during football season. Mike Vukovich, slated to be the starting center, broke a bone in his knee and just recently returned.

“Here’s a kid who came straight out of football, who wasn’t even on the team last year,” McKnight said of Williams. “With Vukovich out, we needed him and he stepped right in.”

“I’ve been playing with these guys for so long, we all know what is expected of each other,” Williams said. “I’m glad to be a part of this team.”

Does he have a future in basketball? Depends on which way you look at it.

“Brad doesn’t have a future in basketball at the next level,” McKnight said. “It’s a lot different and it would not be his thing. Right now, he’s just playing basketball and having lot of fun. He’s not overly stressed about things.”