Northeast Nodaway assistant coach does it all

DALTON VITT/DAILY FORUM
Northeast Nodaway assistant boys basketball coach Desmond Williams calls for a timeout during a recent junior varsity contest. Williams is gaining coaching and teaching experience at Northeast Nodaway, and has served in nearly every role possible at the Student Recreation Center while completing his degree at Northwest Missouri State University.

If you’ve been to a sporting event in or around Nodaway County within the last six months, there’s a decent chance you’ve seen him.

He might have been roaming the basketball sidelines in a shirt and tie, or patrolling the football field in zebra stripes. If you’ve been a student at Northwest for long and have visited the recreation center in the last, oh, five years, then you would probably recognize him and likely be on a first-name basis with him.

Desmond Williams, known mostly by friends as “Des,” pretty much does it all. He started his collegiate journey at Northwest in 2009, and has held nearly every conceivable job in sports as a student.

Williams, a physical education major planning to graduate in May, just finished a semester of student teaching at Northeast Nodaway and now serves as an assistant coach for the Bluejays boys’ basketball team.

His student teaching gig, required for graduation, came under the tutelage of Vance Proffitt, Northeast Nodaway’s athletic director and head girls basketball coach.

“Working with Des is pretty easy because he came in wanting to know how the real world really worked in a school district,” Proffitt said. “Going to Northwest myself, I knew that he was ready to go as a teacher, too. It’s been an easy transition for him to be able to sit in as well as he has.”

Before entering the coaching ranks, Williams started his run of doing seemingly everything by working at the campus student recreation center. The job started as a scorekeeper for intramural sports before he attained office hours, which Williams basically summed up as the holy grail of student employment.

“There was some people graduating, so I kind of got lucky,” Williams said. “I got bumped into the office my second semester working for the rec center. The second semester, I was scoring and timing still, but I was also getting office hours. … That’s kind of where I got a good feel of the people there and what needed to be done in the facility.”

After working his way through the ranks at the rec center, Williams developed a rapport with Bob Lade, who served as the facilities director for more than 25 years before recently accepting a job with the NAIA in Kansas City.

Lade, who is deeply involved with officiating, helped Williams land a referee position for high school football during the fall. More importantly, Lade assisted in getting Williams on the schedule for games.

“My old boss, Bob Lade, he did it for numerous years,” Williams said. “Probably longer than I’ve been alive, he’s been officiating. One day we were sitting around talking, and there were three or four of us in the office working, and he said, ‘Why don’t you guys get involved (in officiating)?’

It was just another opportunity for him to work with kids, teaching them about the game. Williams described it as “coaching through an unbiased eye.”

During his semester of student teaching, Williams adjusted to life at a small, rural school after growing up in an entirely different situation.

Williams attended Marquette High School in St. Louis, forcing him to transition from a metropolitan area as a teen to a midsized, Division II university for college, and now to Northeast Nodaway, miniscule in comparison to his alma mater.

“Freshman year, moving into the dorms, it was a culture shock,” Williams said. “I’m used to the hustle and bustle, even at midnight, you can still hear cars going outside, people outside yelling or talking. But when I got here, everybody goes to sleep and it’s just pindrop quiet. That was a huge change.

“High school-wise, my high school had 2,100 people. I graduated with 480-something, and now there’s 270 kids in the entire school at Northeast Nodaway, so it’s just like, ‘Whoa.’”

He spent his days under Proffitt teaching students the values of fitness and health in physical education classes, balancing life between the classroom and basketball court.

The Northeast Nodaway boys started practice in November, but whether it was a basketball player or a P.E. student, Williams aimed for the same impact.

“I didn’t really have any problems balancing it, because I didn’t really see a lot of my basketball players in P.E. class,” Williams said. “So it was a lot easier for me to take off the coaching hat. I’m not saying I wasn’t coaching some of the students, but I had to be there to keep the students engaged. I always asked for their input on different things they wanted to do and what they didn’t want to do.

“The coaching hat was off, but it was in my back pocket.”

All of Williams’s jobs in the sports community have led toward his eventual goals in life, but those dreams started somewhere.

He’s known for a long time what he wanted to spend his life doing: committing to improving the lives and having a profound impact on a number of young people, students and players alike. That dream started when Williams was in seventh grade, with a science teacher named Darnell Young.

Up to that point, Williams was a black student who was virtually always interacting with white, female teachers. Young became the realization for Williams that a black male could have an impact on kids, as well as the inspiration to make that realization become reality.

“He was just a regular teacher to everyone else, but in my personal experience, he’s my first diverse teacher,” Williams said. “I had one male teacher up until this point. They were mostly female, but 99 percent of them were Caucasian. Then seventh grade science, I had a black teacher — like, what is this? … It wasn’t anything special, but I felt like I connected with him on another level.

“It was like, ‘Hey, this guy’s making a difference in my life. If he’s helping me, I think I should try and carry on a legacy and try and help someone else.’”

According to Proffitt, Williams won’t have any trouble influencing students in the way he’d like to.

“He’s a great role model for the kids,” Proffitt said. “He’s very knowledgeable and that helps, and the kids see that right off the bat. He definitely does, both teaching and coaching. He does things the right way. He wants to get to know the kids, and they enjoy that type of thing if you take the time to get to know them. They really buy in to what he is usually doing, and that helps, too, that he’s built good relationships with them.”

While Williams has a passion for what he’s doing now, his dream job is to be the next Shaka Smart or Gregg Marshall at the high school level, coaches who have transformed Virginia Commonwealth and Wichita State from basketball welterweights to Division I powerhouses.

“It’s a toss-up right now between college and high school,” Williams said. “I could do either, but I’d like to pick a program up, like an unheard of program and then take them into ‘Everybody knows who we are now.’ Like, ‘I want to play for that coach.’ I think that I’d like to do that with a high school before I try the college level, though.”

Any job that big would come with one caveat: he likely wouldn’t be able to hold three other sports jobs on the side. Williams has literally been a jack-of-all-trades when it comes to athletics in the last few years, and that experience will shine on his resume as he moves forward with his career, he said.

But for now, Williams has a couple more months of the 2014-15 season with Northeast Nodaway before concerning himself too much with what the future holds. The student teaching experience was a success for him, and one that he holds dear.

“Some days it felt like just another day at the office,” Williams said. “But, for example, you’re supposed to step with your opposite foot when you throw. There were some elementary kids that were just standing flat foot and using their arm. By the end of it, I could get them to throw the entire length of the gym. Days like that were days I went home with a smile on my face knowing I did my job.”