New UMS-Wright head football coach Sam Williams addresses supporters and his new players Monday. Williams was 45-10 at Brandon (Miss.) with three trips to the state championship game in the last four seasons. (Jimmy Wigfield/Call News)
By JIMMY WIGFIELD
MOBILE — Many football coaches were dissuaded from applying for the UMS-Wright job because of the program’s tradition and championship expectations and the inevitable comparisons to Terry Curtis.
One man was not and he’s now standing in the gargantuan shoes Curtis left on the front porch when he retired.
Sam Williams, who took Class 7A Brandon High School to the Mississippi state championship game in three of the last four years, left a loaded football team to take over at a school that Curtis led to eight Alabama state championships, although the last one was in 2019.
Brandon had seven Division I prospects returning in 2025 and UMS-Wright has struggled in recent years in Class 5A. Yet, the 131-year-old institution on Old Shell Road tugged at him in a way Williams could not ignore.
“I wasn’t looking to leave,” Williams said on Monday, when he was introduced as the Bulldogs’ new coach. “It was a super-talented football team. But sometimes you can’t pass up opportunities when you feel like you’ve ticked every box. … The football part, obviously, was a no-brainer. It’s a great football program here, it’s a great place to coach. I just know that it’s a place that we can have a lot of success going forward.”
Williams, 33, whose father played baseball for Steve Kittrell at the University of South Alabama, did not pursue the job or the school. The job and the school pursued him.
Curtis, who will remain at UMS-Wright as a consultant and fundraiser, was not involved in the search for his successor but made a phone call that Williams said helped him decide to make the move.
“Coach Curtis is a large part of why I’m here,” Williams said as Curtis stood unobtrusively in the back of the room. “We didn’t know each other. We talked on the phone. He put UMS-Wright football on the map. He built a strong legacy. A guy like me doesn’t stand up here behind the podium today if it’s not for him. So, thank you, coach. When a guy’s here for 26 years this day and age, it speaks to the commitment that the place has to that program and to the coach. It was real reassuring to get that phone call from him.”
But there was an even higher power at work than Curtis and the search committee, Williams said.
“The search committee really sold me on the vision, on the staying power of this football program and of this school,” Williams said. “This is a God thing. God puts you in places for seasons of life. Now it’s time to be at UMS and it’s time to jump in.”
Williams said succeeding Curtis and assuming responsibility for the future success of one of the state’s great high school football programs doesn’t give him pause.
“I think for a lot of guys, that kind of intimidates them to follow that up but it doesn’t bother me because I’m not trying to be him,” Williams said. “I’m gonna be my own guy. I’m comfortable in my own skin. … What I said here at this podium, that’s who I am. That’s why I don’t need notes. This is what I do every single day. So, I’m going to be comfortable in my skin. We’re going to do things the right way. I don’t really think there’s any pressure. We’re going to win ballgames.”
Williams couldn’t say if he’ll have Curtis’ longevity. This is his fourth head coach’s job in nine years.
“I’m going to do the best I can every single day,” he said. “If that means that I’m here 26 years or 27 or five, I don’t know.”
UMS-Wright Head of School Dr. Doug Barber and Frank Lott of the board of trustees said the search committee paid little attention to the technical aspects of football when considering Williams.
“To me, it’s not whether or not the players believe in the system,” Barber said. “It’s about whether or not they believe in him.”
Barber agreed that many coaches find the UMS-Wright job intimidating.
“But it’s not to him and it’s not because he’s arrogant,” Barber said of Williams. “He’s confident. And he knows we’re going to support him and this community is going to support him and these kids are going to do like they’ve always done since I’ve been here. They’re going to play hard and work hard in the classroom.”
Lott said he also did not talk about football when he called Williams, a former Mississippi State receiver who was 45-10 in four seasons at Brandon.
“We didn’t talk about X’s and O’s,” Lott said. “We just talked about his values and his family and the values of this school. And we knew that those aligned. We set out to find, number one, a high-character man who understood and appreciated the mission and the vision of the school. And then we wanted a proven winner. And we quickly found out that Sam checked both those boxes. … We didn’t get into what his coaching style was. We wanted a man to lead these young men at our school. We ended up finding what I believe is the right guy to lead us into the next phase of UMS football.”
The next phase will feature some dramatic changes, including playing much faster than Curtis’ teams were accustomed to and with the quarterback in the pistol and shotgun, not under center much of the time.
“It is going to look a lot different from a gameplan standpoint,” Williams said. “We play a very unique brand of football, so it’s going to be exciting. We’re going to try to be the fastest team in the state of Alabama. We’re going to fly. When we were cooking in Mississippi, we’re 10 to 12 seconds (to snap the football). It’s a lot of fun. It puts people on their back foot. It’s a fun brand of football for the kids to play. Defensively, we’re going to be the most disciplined and play harder than anybody that you’ll ever see. I think that’s part of relationships. That’s part of doing your job and wanting to do it so bad for your brother that you can’t stand it.”
But Williams cautioned installing the faster, attacking style cannot be rushed.
“I think the biggest thing is not being arrogant in the fact that things do take a long time,” he said. “You never give the kids more than they can handle. We’re gonna have to really just start from the bare bones, like they’re junior high kids playing varsity football and build it up.”
In a meeting with those players Monday, Williams said he stressed three things:
“I talked about attacking,” he said. “Attacking is a mentality. It’s something that will be really personal to us but it’s a mentality you wake up with every day when you put your feet on the floor. Be better than the guy next to you. It’s a future-oriented mentality. It’s something that will stay with you forever. I talked about doing your job, having a role in the team. If you’re going to be a part of something, be the best version of you. We all have different levels of talent but how great do you want to be? And then growing together as family. That starts today.”
As the search for the new coach began, Barber said an old friend from Mississippi, former Northwest Rankin baseball coach and athletic director Jeff McClaskey, suggested he call Williams, although he doubted Williams would leave Brandon. Barber persisted and asked McClaskey to ascertain if Williams would accept a phone call.
From that point, the search committee showed Williams it could be as fast as his offense.
“I got a text message from somebody I knew,” Williams said, “and 15 minutes later, I got the phone call and I was like, man, they must actually really be serious about this. I think me and Frank talked for about 15 or 20 minutes on the front porch and it evolved into a Zoom meeting and evolved into an in-person meeting and then getting here. It went really fast, a lot faster than some searches I’ve been a part of.”
Barber was convinced when the Zoom call ended.
“We all looked at each other and we were like, ‘We’ve got to see what we’ve got to do to get this guy,”” Barber said.
Barber and UMS-Wright upper-school principal Wes Lathan felt so strongly about Williams that they were compelled to go to Jackson to visit Williams and especially his wife, Rachael.
“I knew it was going to depend on her,” Barber said.
Afterward, the school brought the Williamses to Mobile the day before Mardi Gras and he was offered the job. He was one of eight coaches from Alabama, Georgia and Mississippi who were interviewed, Barber said.
“What I knew is the conversation that we had with him aligned with everything that we try to do,” Barber said. “It’s about growing men, through relationship building, through challenging them, through accountability. It’s all the things I’ve watched Terry do for 26 years. At UMS, we seek to be a leadership organization that looks like a school. I want him to lead men.”
Barber said Williams reminds him of Curtis when he came to UMS-Wright in 1999.
“I was on that committee when we hired Terry and those are the same things that attracted me to him then,” Barber said. “Terry had not won any championships as a head coach before he came here but I knew him and I knew how important it was for kids to play for him. I think these kids are going to be very fortunate to be around Sam Williams.”
Williams was 82-24 overall in eight years as a head coach at Ridgeland, Pelahatchie and Brandon.
