Hips back, arms extended out of the paint, defender draped on his backside, Trevion Williams called for the ball with his eyes.
Ryan Cline picked up on the non-verbal cue and dropped the ball into Williams’ reach and the freshman peeked over his shoulder, checking for an incoming double team. None came. Instead, the spindly frame of fellow freshman Eric Hunter Jr. appeared at the opposite wing and Williams instinctively whipped a pass through traffic right into his classmate's shooting pocket.
Catch.
Williams turned his body to face Hunter as the Purdue bench rose in anticipation a few feet behind him.
Release.
Williams trotted back down to the other end of the court.
Bang.
Williams lifted his right arm, curling his fingers into a ‘3,’ in celebration.
That play, in the larger scheme of things, was just one in Purdue’s eventual trouncing of Northwestern, sealing the Boilermakers' 24th Big Ten championship in their history. But, that play — that six-point, seven-rebound performance — was a breath of fresh air following a suffocating month of basketball for Williams.
He briefly lost his spot in Purdue’s rotation after a February that consisted mostly of a few short stints on the court during which he attracted the referees’ whistle, often within minutes of checking in.
But there is a resurgence coming. There were glimpses of it against the Wildcats.
That midseason stretch that had Purdue faithful eagerly comparing him to the iconic Caleb Swanigan was no fluke. How to be so sure of such a thing? To understand that, you need to meet the Trevion Williams that those closest to him are familiar with — the ball player that isn’t here to model his game after someone else.
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If you’ve played basketball at any level — from driveway pickup to the professional ranks — you know the age-old tradition of mimicking your favorite players as you shoot the ball. A contested fadeaway jumper that drops clean through the net might have you saying, “Just like Kobe.”
Williams, in case you hadn’t noticed, isn’t like the rest of us. And it’s not just because his 6-foot-8 frame towers over most people.
Every time a ball goes through the net or a piece of paper gets balled up and tossed into a trash can, he isn’t chasing the dream of becoming the next great Purdue big man; he’s thinking about becoming the first Trevion Williams.
“Just like Tre,” he’s thinking every time the ball goes through the net.
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The Bears were hosting the Cardinals that Sunday in 2015. It was a late summer September afternoon, perfect football weather in Chicago.
And that’s exactly what Trevion spent the day doing, playing football at his aunt’s house with cousins and his Uncle Ty. He had a close relationship with all his uncles but especially Ty, who he considered a father figure.
Trevion talked to Uncle Ty about everything, school, girls, basketball, whatever it may have been. They were a staple in the 2-on-2 circuit at the park not too far away, with Trevion dominating and Ty right alongside him as the biggest supporter and coach.
That Sunday, Trevion’s mother, Shawndra Lewis, a nurse, was working a double shift, so he went home with his grandmother. Uncle Ty left separately. About 20 minutes after Williams made it home, Lewis looked down at her phone to see a series of missed calls from her son.
She called him back and immediately heard her mother screaming in the background.
“Mom, Uncle Ty got shot,” Trevion said.
The next time she saw Trevion was at the hospital. She rushed inside not knowing if her brother was still alive. That’s when Lewis saw Trevion, broken down against a wall, his face completely red with tears.
She knew then.
“I went to him for everything,” Trevion recalled. “After he passed, our family kind of broke down.”
Ten days later, at the funeral, Trevion approached his mom and asked if he could move to his other uncle’s house in Michigan. There were a lot of tears as Lewis struggled with the realization that her only child wanted to leave home, but she knew it was the right decision.
“You just get tired of it,” he said. “You get tired of the violence. Especially when you’ve been living there for so long.
“Where I live, you just have to be on alert. Sometimes you can’t even play basketball in peace. There’s always that one guy who’s gonna get super mad if you foul him too hard.”
Two weeks later, Trevion was in a car headed for the suburbs of Detroit looking for peace — both on and off the basketball court.
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Matt Painter was in a chipper mood talking to those assembled in the media room at Mackey Arena. If you ask him a question after most games, he’ll mix nuance and specifics with requisite coachspeak. But, today, he’s willing to talk about pretty much anything. His team did just beat Indiana for the seventh time in its last eight tries, so that might explain his chatty nature.
One question gets him talking about the sort of players that enable a program like Purdue to sustain success in the manner it has over the past five years.
“Sometimes people get enamored with recruiting but if you can’t keep them, you can’t grow,” Painter says. ”We get Vince Edwards and he’s great for four years. We get A.J. Hammons and he’s great for four years.
“Maybe our guys don’t get ranked high when they’re 17 or 18 years old, but we rank ‘em high.”
So where do you find guys like that? It depends. P.J. Thompson was picked up down the road in Indianapolis. Dakota Mathias was perfecting his jump shot in a homemade basketball court literally built into his Elida, Ohio, home.
Trevion Williams fits many of the requirements to join that list of Boilermakers. Thanks in part to an injury his junior year in Detroit, he may not have been recruited at a level his play at Purdue to date would suggest. He's shown flashes of ability this season that leave people wondering what havoc the finished product could wreak on the Big Ten one day.
But Williams’ story is a bit more complicated. Painter found Trevion Williams in a suburb of Detroit, living in his uncle Curtis Lewis’ house. The first time Painter saw the raw aggressiveness Williams put on display for the The Family, the Michigan-based AAU program, he saw what was cultivated a few hours southwest in Chicago where Williams grew up.
Williams will quickly to tell you there is no tougher place to play basketball than in his hometown of Chicago. The Windy City has a reputation as a breeding ground for some of the most talented players to ever grace the hardtop. It is also home to some of the most violent streets in the country. Williams grew up in the midst of both those competing forces, forces that often crossed over into each other’s paths.
Jerrell Tribble, a Chicago native and former Division III player at Benedictine University, started training Williams when he was just 12 years old. Tribble knows far too well how battles on the basketball court can sometimes spill into conflicts in the streets.
“When you think about Chicago’s inner-city youth and gangs,” Tribble said, “a person like Tre that is good at what he does, there are some embarrassing moments that people are receiving at his hands. So just out of jealousy and bitterness, people want to fight or see you after the games. It's just a lot to deal with growing up in the city. Basketball or no basketball, the lines are blurred. Anything goes.”
When Williams walked into the gym for the first time to meet Tribble, he was met with two pointed questions. First: "Are you here because you want to be here or because your mom made you?"
Williams said he wanted to be here.
The second question: "What do you want to work on?"
“Footwork,” Williams said.
Wait, really? A middle schooler with some obvious talent, albeit muffled sometimes by his weight, wanted to craft his footwork. Not scoring or dribbling or dunking like the rest of his friends on the AAU circuit — no, Williams wanted to work on his feet.
An impressed Tribble was immediately taken by the hefty middle-schooler and set to work. He told Williams, “If you put the work in, you can do whatever you want to do. …. You can go to any school in the country you want to — guaranteed.”
There was something obvious in the mentality Williams showed at an early age, even if the promise of ending up at any school in the country was overly optimistic at the time. But it takes more than mental fortitude and the right attitude to end up playing in the Big Ten.
The dream that Tribble suggested didn’t exactly settle in Williams’ mind until his freshman year of high school. The quickly growing teenager had transitioned to Mount Carmel High School, a well-known prep school that played against the toughest competition around the state. By the end of his freshman season, Williams had been called up to the varsity team and was turning heads with his play.
But it wasn’t any performance on the court that made a difference in Williams’ life.
“At that time, I don’t think Tre was like, ‘I’m going to play college basketball and I’m going to the NBA,’” Tribble said. “It was more like, ‘This is something that I’m good at and I like it so I’m just going to do it.’ I don’t think he had any real goals attached to it.”
The passing of Uncle Ty stirred something inside Williams that manifested itself on the basketball court, though, according to Tribble. “I think that’s when he really started to put it out there like, ‘I’m really going to pursue this and make this happen.’”
The welcoming embrace of another uncle helped ease the pain following Uncle Ty's death.
It was a smooth transition to his new home because Trevion is a “helpful kid,” Curtis Lewis, Trevion’s oldest uncle, said, but school had its own challenges. Trevion had convinced his mom that he could leave, in part, due to the fact that Lewis had just been named the principal of the Henry Ford Academy for Creative Studies, a charter school in the heart of Detroit.
Curtis wanted to ensure that Trevion wasn’t getting any preferential treatment because of his stature as a good basketball player or nephew of the principal.
“I’m going to be as hard on you as I am on anyone else,” Lewis told him. In Trevion’s eyes, of course, his uncle was being too harsh but he knew it came from a place of love.
Trevion had spent part of the summer leading up to Uncle Ty’s murder in Detroit playing in the summer league at the charter school, so he quickly fit in with his peers. His newly embraced goal of playing college basketball helped refocus the teenager from the traumatic experience that had changed almost every part of his life.
Curtis Lewis earned all three of his degrees from Michigan State, so him being a lifelong Spartan, it's easy to understand his excitement when Tom Izzo started recruiting Trevion.
Despite bleeding green and white on game day, Lewis knew the moment he got into the car with Trevion after their official visit to West Lafayette that there was hardly a choice to be made.
Trevion knew it too. Unlike other coaches that would spend a half-hour with Trevion and the family, Matt Painter and the staff spent almost all day with them, answering questions and selling a program that has returned to national prominence in the last five years.
“Because we’re a close-knit family, creating a family atmosphere was important to us … Purdue was just really over the top in a good way,” Lewis said.
They drove back to Detroit knowing that Purdue was the right choice for them.
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That visit also laid the foundation for one of the most important relationships that have allowed Williams to flourish this season. Trevion and his family sat down with Lauren Link, Purdue’s director of sports nutrition, during the visit to discuss the rigorous weight-loss process to come.
This wasn’t the first time Williams was attempting to tackle his weight issue.
When he was 13 years old, he decided “something had to change” as he approached the 230-240 pound range. He took a whole summer off from AAU basketball to just work out and lose weight. It worked — well, sort of. He did manage to stop the routine of playing basketball and coming back home to stuff himself with ice cream, as he puts it, but eventually, he slipped back to his bad habits and the weight returned.
This time around, Trevion was more motivated. As soon as he officially committed to Purdue, he began texting Link updates on a semi-regular basis on the sorts of foods he was eating. Naturally, it was hard to control the diet of a high schooler, but it was a start.
But when Williams showed up to campus at the start of the summer he weighed in at 316 pounds, well above what the coaching staff had expected. Painter told him right away that he wasn’t going to play until he lost the weight. Realistically, he couldn’t have put Williams on the floor even if he wanted to; the big man wouldn’t have lasted more than a few possessions playing at Big Ten speed at that weight.
There was major work to be done with the team’s newly hired strength and conditioning coach, Gavin Roberts. Roberts, a former Purdue football player, arrived on campus just a week after Williams did.
The two set off on a rigorous, seven-days-a-week journey to train and work off the weight that was holding Williams back. There is a fine line, though, that Roberts tried to straddle between making progress and pushing Williams too hard in the gym. To get the best results during training, he realized that Williams had to trust him and that wasn’t going to be built overnight.
During the summer, the two would just go for walks around Purdue’s practice fields on hot days to break a sweat. They’d stumble upon football practices and watch, mingle with other coaches and talk about life away from basketball.
No one on this roster is attempting the transformation that Williams is, Roberts pointed out, and that can be a lonely journey.
On Link’s end, the frequency of texts about food and meal plans steadily increased once he arrived on campus. During an early conversation, Trevion mentioned that he wanted to go vegan and tried cutting out a lot of meat from his diet. But, Link wisely pointed out that making extreme changes to his meals wouldn’t create sustainable results in the long run and they worked together to find a more reasonable balance.
Link’s job, in a way, is more challenging than Roberts' because her goal is to promote better eating habits when Williams is away from the facility. The biggest growth moment in the first few months of training actually happened when Trevion went back home to Detroit for the Fourth of July weekend.
“You can’t put bad gas in a Lamborghini and expect it to run at its peak,” Roberts had reminded him.
When he arrived back home, Trevion opened the fridge, surveyed the landscape and closed it, dissatisfied. He waited for his mom to return home from work and promptly told her that they needed to visit Whole Foods because he needed healthier options to eat.
The two left for Whole Foods and soon Link got a text from Trevion with a picture attached. It was a bag veggie tater-tots, a creative way of getting the vegetables he needed into his diet.
She asked, “Is that the whole meal?”
Williams replied, “Yeah.”
“No, you need to add some protein to that,” she sent back.
An impressed Shawndra Lewis looked on as Trevion went aisle to aisle checking off food groups, texting Link to make sure he was adding only the healthiest options for his diet.
He even did his best to avoid his Uncle Curtis’ beloved fried kitchen, a staple of the Fourth of July menu. “His fried chicken is the best … and he always cooks it when I come home,” Williams said.
When he weighed back in after returning to campus it caught almost everyone by surprise. He'd not only maintained over the holiday — he’d lost weight on his trip back home.
"We're like, 'OK, wow, that's a pleasant surprise,'" Link recalled. "I do remember being excited when he got back. Like, we didn't take a couple steps back."
There’s a smile across Link’s face as she recalls getting that text and the subsequent weigh-in, seeing the progress and the habits instilled carrying over to all parts of an athlete's life lets her know the process is working.
Every time he goes back home, family and friends are quick to remind him about how much weight he’s lost since he left for college, nearly 50 pounds by now.
Roberts took a “before” picture on the first day they started working out together. He grins just thinking about the reaction he’ll get when shows Trevion the “after” picture once the season is over, deep into March, they hope.
The weight loss has been the key marker for most people drawing the comparison between Williams and Swanigan, but physical transformations of such magnitude take shape around the type of person attempting it.
Swanigan had his adoptive father Roosevelt Barnes in his corner from an early age, instilling hardcore regimens to ensure weight loss would keep. The future All-American wore a weighted vest under his clothes during high school to constantly work his body. There were days at Purdue where the only thing Swanigan did was condition and go to practice.
There is no such plan for Williams. The only goal that was set for the freshman since he arrived was to lose a pound or two per week and some weeks are better than others. That’s how he is down to the 270 range. That’s how he’s earned his time on the court.
Swanigan came in as a heralded five-star prospect with the expectation of a one-and-done season before he even arrived on campus. The McDonald's All-American and two-time USA Basketball gold medalist wasn't far off being a finished product as a basketball player when he arrived for what turned out to be two seasons in West Lafayette.
Williams is not that; he’s still very malleable — he's still the kid that wanted to work on his footwork before anything else. He was brought to Purdue as a project of sorts for Painter and Brandon Brantley to work on over the course of three or four years. The thing Painter knows he can count on Williams to be right now is a rebounding force. For every quick-footed post move that he’s shown Purdue fans, there are facets to his game that haven’t even begun to emerge.
Williams isn’t trying to fill someone else shoes or trying to copy someone else’s moves — he’s carving his own path. Maybe it will end up in the NBA like Swanigan’s, maybe it won’t.
The comparisons flatter Williams and he appreciates them but he’s quick to remind everyone of something.
“He’s Caleb.”
“I’m Trevion.”
Atreya Verma is a reporter covering the Purdue men’s basketball and football teams. If you have thoughts, comments or concerns you can reach him at verma43@purdue.edu or on Twitter @atreya_verma.
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