For the past 25 years Boo Williams has been helping kids and hoops
August 16th, 2007
Originally written By RICH RADFORD, The Virginian-Pilot© August 12, 2007
HAMPTON
Even by Boo Williams’ standards, this has been a busy morning.Before Williams could escape the insurance office he runs as his “real” job, Virginia Tech men’s basketball coach Seth Greenberg has called. Tulsa’s Doug Wojcik and UCLA’s Ben Howland, too. Even new Duke women’s coach Joanne P. McCallie.
As his black 2000 Lexus accelerates down congested Mercury Boulevard, his cell phone rings. Williams recognizes the number, picks up, then blurts, “I’ll call you back.”
He is on his way to a lunch meeting to discuss the $13.5 million sportsplex that will carry his name after it’s completed. Sitting at a stoplight, he talks about his recent trip to Argentina to observe that country’s national youth program.
“They practiced those kids from 9 to 5,” Williams said. “If we did that over here, we’d be arrested for child abuse.”
He mentions a planned fall trip to Serbia. As national chairman of AAU boys basketball, Williams’ duty is to know all there is to know about youth basketball – in the United States and around the world.
About now, you may be picturing Williams, 48, as a wheeler-dealer type, sporting silk slacks, polished Cole Haans, crisp dress shirt and stylish tie.
But Boo Williams is hardly a slick, sophisticated, confident salesman.
As he slides his cell phone back into his pants pocket, his shirt collar is slightly upturned at the corner. Has been the entire ride. Part of his shirttail is hanging out, one shoe is untied and he hasn’t found time to shave this day.
And when you listen to him speak, you get no deep baritone from this 6-foot-8 former power forward. Instead, you get a folksy, somewhat high-pitched drawl with a hint of a regionalized lisp. More Floyd The Barber than Barry White.
Don’t be misled.
“Albert Einstein was probably looked at as being a bit off-center, somewhat eccentric and definitely a slob,” said Howard White, a vice president of Nike in charge of the Jordan brand. “Visionaries and geniuses don’t always come in the shapes and forms we expect.
“People probably look at Boo and wonder, ‘How does he get all of that stuff done?’ It’s because he’s a visionary. He’s like Einstein. He’s like Bill Gates…. Boo always had a plan.”
When word got out 25 years ago that Boo Williams was starting an AAU summer basketball program in Hampton Roads, those more experienced in the game scoffed.
Basketball, they reminded Williams, is an inner-city game that thrives on hot asphalt in places such as New York and Philadelphia. They asked: Do they even have asphalt in that little backwater corner of the world where Williams lives?
But Marcellus Spencer Williams Jr. – no wonder he goes by Boo – knew there were players in Hampton Roads. And he knew they just needed a platform and a little exposure.
During summers when he played at Saint Joseph’s University in Philadelphia, he schooled himself in the finer points of summer league hoops.
“I was 18 or 19 years old, but I was paying attention,” said Williams, who played basketball professionally overseas for a time. “I was going to see what they were doing in the Rutgers League, the Harlem League, the Philly/New York Classic. Sonny Hill, who ran his own league in Philadelphia, taught me the whole thing.”
When his playing days were over, Williams returned to Hampton, where he’d grown up and starred at Phoebus High. He brought together a small group of players from the region and held a four-team draft, lining up a sponsor for each squad.
Here’s a shirt, kid; hope it fits. Talk about modest beginnings.
Today, the numbers are anything but modest. There are about 2,500 players in Williams’ program, nearly two-thirds from South Hampton Roads. The amount of Nike’s annual sponsorship of the Boo Williams Summer League is in “the six figures.” Teams in his organization regularly play for national AAU titles – and win a fair share. National players of the year bloom from the fertile landscape others once saw as a barren desert.
And out of that desert an oasis is rising.
Williams’ idea for a sportsplex is more than a decade old. He wanted a centralized building that could hold major AAU basketball events, but it took awhile for his plans to unfold. Investors had to be wooed, financing acquired.
He lined up six investors from the region and talked the city of Hampton into partnering. Williams said they talked with eight banks before Wachovia signed on. “Most of the banks we approached thought we were crazy.”
The sportsplex is being built on land near the intersection of North Armistead Avenue and Hampton Roads Center Parkway in Hampton. The city dedicated four acres valued at more than $500,000 and promised $2 million in infrastructure. The facility will house eight basketball courts and is expected to be completed in the spring.
The building originally was planned to be used for basketball only, but Williams agreed to go beyond that. It will include a six-lane indoor track and can host volleyball, indoor field hockey, wrestling and gymnastics.
“I think we have a deal where Boo will rent the land for something like $1 a year,” Hampton Mayor Ross Kearney II said. “Boo Williams is not a fly-by-night developer. He’s been faithful to this cause of his for so long that when he said, ‘I have an idea,’ people listened.”
Ground for the sportsplex was broken May 2, and dry weather since has allowed construction to speed along. The steel girders are up and the expected completion date is March 1, meaning it could be ready to host the annual Boo Williams Nike Spring Invitational.
Each year for the past 21 years, Williams’ tournament has brought the nation’s best high school players to the region. More than 300 boys and girls teams journey to Hampton Roads, their games floating between high school gyms and college campus facilities.
The sportsplex will be the tourney’s hub. It also is expected to host a variety of national AAU tournaments and the 2010 Junior Olympics.
“People need to recognize the revenue that Boo Williams pumps into the economy in Hampton Roads,” White said. “His tournaments bring in 1,800 players a pop. All those players need a place to stay…. Right there is the payoff for his community.”
Williams hooked up with Nike almost from the start.
Feeling the need to push its basketball shoes in the mid-1980s, Nike signed Michael Jordan as its primary spokesman and endorser. But the fledgling shoe company also wanted to get in on the ground floor with a few grass-roots programs, and Sonny Vaccaro was hired to handle that.
Vaccaro had made a name for himself by starting the Nike All-American summer camp for the nation’s best players. But behind the scenes, he also targeted four programs for Nike to align itself with: Issy Washington’s Slam-N-Jam Basketball club in Southern California; Rich Goldberg’s ARC program in the San Fernando Valley; the St. Cecilia Summer League in Detroit; and Williams’ upstart program.
Vaccaro said he liked the way Williams did things. “I’ve watched Boo grow this thing, and he’s done it with nothing but class,” Vaccaro said. “He did it without a lot of fanfare. And now look at it. Of those I signed at the start, Boo is really the last man standing.
“And the game’s not over for Boo. He’s still a young guy.”
Williams operates his leagues almost exclusively with volunteers. He sees the coaching slots as a training ground for people who aspire to coach for a living. The only people paid for their efforts in the Boo Williams Summer League are two administrators who try to keep everything running. Williams said he is not paid for his position as chairman of AAU boys basketball, although his expenses are covered.
Williams and his wife, Shanya, a speech therapist, live in a three-bedroom ranch in the Farmington area of Hampton. They have no children.
“That window passed us by,” Williams said. “Then I realized I deal with so many kids anyway that I made sure the window was closed.”
The Boo Williams Summer League program has players from ages 9 to 19. Williams will tell you that it’s not easy spotting the ones who will grow up to be stars. He remembers one particular oversight.
“Guards are better early, but some never progress, and others don’t grow,” Williams said. ” Player development is a marathon, not a sprint. We cut Joe Smith – Joe Smith! – from our 12-under travel team. He wasn’t good enough.
“Six years later the kid was the No. 1 draft pick in the NBA.”
Willie Young, who starred at Norview, played at Tennessee-Chattanooga and is playing professionally in Germany 10 years later, remembers the allure of playing in Williams’ travel team program.
“When I was a kid, I’d go watch my uncle Ralph Young, playing for Boo,” Willie Young said. “Ralph played on Boo teams with J.R. Reid and Alonzo Mourning. After that, I wanted to be one of Boo’s guys, no matter what. So I worked and worked at it.”
It bothered Williams that his image took a hit in the late ’80s and early ’90s. Williams was accused of steering players, behind the scenes, toward certain colleges and away from others.
“People saw a Georgetown connection after Alonzo Mourning and Allen Iverson ended up there,” said Dennis Koutoufas, head coach at Heritage High in Newport News. “And Vernon Macklin is now at Georgetown. If I was Boo, I’d take it as a compliment that people thought I was that influential.”
For the first 10 years of the Boo Williams Summer League, he admits he was heavily invested in each player’s recruitment. He counseled Mourning and Iverson on their choices, just like he did all the players in his program. But about 15 years ago, Williams said he started backing away.
“It all just became too much,” Williams said. “If I was going to sit in on one home visit, then I felt obligated to sit in on all of them. And I started figuring if a kid was visiting with an ACC school, an SEC school and a Big East school, then did he really need my help?
“… Plus, I got tired of coaches losing out on a player, then pointing the finger at me and saying, ‘It’s Boo’s fault.’
“I don’t need that. There are kids searching for a place to play. Those are the ones who really need my help, where if I make a call to a Division II school and say, ‘Hey, I think this kid would be a good fit for you,’ then I’m doing my job.”
Koutoufas says that happens more often than people know.
“I had this kid, Victor Mickel, when I was still coaching at Denbigh, who had no offers,” Koutoufas said. “I call Boo up and tell him I’m coming over to his office to meet and that I’ve got three or four schools where I think Victor would be a good fit. One of them is the Naval Academy. Boo picks up the phone and calls Navy.
“The next day, Navy’s coaching staff is at my school. They didn’t have film of Victor or anything. They were recruiting him purely on the recommendation of Boo Williams. Victor ended up being the captain of the team as a senior at Navy. Boo has more power than he knows.”
Players, too, will tell you about the power he wields.
“I remember he came to see me play in my district tournament when I was a junior” in high school, said Derrick Bryant, an undersized 6-foot-4 forward who starred at Norfolk State in the mid-1990s. “When I heard he was in the stands watching, I was just a bundle of nerves.”
Williams liked what he saw and invited Bryant to play on his travel squad. Bryant went on to team with Iverson and Smith on Williams’ 17-under squad that won an AAU national championship. For Bryant, they were the most exciting times of his young life.
“The first time I ever went on an airplane I was traveling with Boo. Might have been the first time I ever left the state,” Bryant said. “I can remember packing into vans with Iverson and Smith. We were just traveling and having a blast.”
Bryant played professionally overseas for 10 seasons, but when he returned to his hometown this past year, he was quick to volunteer as an assistant on the U-16 squad this summer.
“It’s my way of saying thanks to Boo,” Bryant said. “He’s the reason for a lot of good things happening in my life.”
Mickel, a lieutenant commander stationed at the Pentagon’s Navy Annex, said being a part of Williams’ program “helps you in more ways than just basketball.”
“His assistant coaches come from a wide range of backgrounds and experiences,” Mickel said. “It’s positive men doing great things. Boo Williams basketball is about a lot more than just Boo. And people come out of the program and are successful in a lot of different ways at a lot of different things.”
Williams said he has soured some to the changing landscape, realizing today’s top players often come with baggage.
“A good player is a good player, but a great player? People see a meal ticket, and it all becomes about money,” Williams said.
Maybe this is why Williams was so willing to add a girls program to his organization. As he points out, girls don’t come with posses because there are no multimillion dollar contracts down the road.
Boo spent the early part of July in Orlando, coaching his U-16 girls to a national championship. He proudly points out that not all of his program’s national players of the year have been boys. There also was La’Keshia Frett, deemed best in the land 12 years ago.
“The girls basketball is where the incredible growth is now,” Williams said. “There was a time when girls basketball was a suburban game. But now it’s the inner-city black kid that’s making waves.”
Whether he’s coaching boys or girls, Williams has a natural calming air about him that works to his team’s favor, Young said.
“He’s always enjoying the show and he’s always relaxed,” Young said. “Maybe it was because he always had a talented group on the court and chances were good he was going to win.”
For Williams, each July plays out as one continuous road trip. After the U-16s in Orlando, Williams headed to New York with the team for the Nike Slam Jam, then to Augusta, Ga., to join up with the boys 17-under squad for the Peach Jam. Three days at home were followed by a trip to the University of Maryland with his girls U-16s, then it was back to Orlando for two weeks with the boys squad.
Williams figures he might be the only person in the country coaching two high-level squads of different sexes. “Some people think I’m crazy to do it,” Williams said. “And they might be right.”
Then again, Williams would have it no other way.
