Trevion Williams' sudden emergence started with summer efforts

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Trevion Williams has been the surprise of Purdue’s season, trending toward maybe being one of the surprises of the season in the Big Ten.

And he’s as surprised as anyone, every day.

“Sometimes I look in the mirror and don’t even know who I am,” he said. “I see all these old pictures from before I got here … and it’s totally different. I surprise myself every day.”

Most freshmen, when they reach the college level, need to get in shape.

Williams didn’t just need to get in shape. He needed to transform.

The 6-foot-9 post player arrived at a robust 320 pounds, largely because of less-than-ideal habits, and maybe in some small way because of the foot injury he dealt with his junior year at Ford Academy in Detroit.

When asked in the summer of the freshman’s ambition to develop from a 5/center into a 4/forward, Matt Painter put it like this: “He’s closer to a 6.”

This was weeks after he’d set his mandate to Williams in no uncertain terms.

“Coach kind of laid it all out there for me right away as soon as I came in,” Williams said. “He said, ‘Trevion, if you don’t lose a lot of weight, you’re not going to play.’”

That much was probably understood from the get-go anyway, but the message did resonate for a player with big plans. Williams has worn ambition on his sleeve, that aim being to follow in Caleb Swanigan’s mold at Purdue. It was Swanigan’s success with the Boilermakers that stood front and center in Painter and his staff landing Williams.

While it would still be premature to make credible comparisons between Williams as a freshman and the former McDonald’s and college All-American, one distinct difference is this: Swanigan got to Purdue in shape. His well-documented physical metamorphosis was complete, or at least close enough to it for him to perform at a high level right away in college.

Williams’ process was only just beginning.

As mid-January nears and Williams is 50 pounds lighter than he was in June, heading into Tuesday night's Rutgers game around 270 pounds, it would seem as if there might be a particularly interesting story there, some sort of miracle method that yielded such results.

There’s really not.

“It was just him eating better and getting him to be more active on a day off, something like that, especially in the summer, getting him to understand that it’s OK for him to just grab a gallon of water and go outside to just walk around and see the campus,” said Gavin Roberts, the men’s basketball program’s sports performance coach. “You’re building a sweat, burning calories. There’s no secret exercise we were doing that just shifted everything.

“It was just consistency.”

And awareness, and personal responsibility.

“I love food. I love snacking,” Williams said. “Being able to discipline yourself, not eat after 8 o’clock and making good choices in what you eat. One thing I established pretty early in the summer was I needed to eat my biggest meal around 3 or 4, and then at night, I’d have some fruit or something like that, something more protein-ish, and then lots of water.”

Lauren Link, Purdue’s director of sports nutrition, had Williams document his eating habits.

“She knows best,” Williams said. “She’s helped me out a lot.”

A self-proclaimed “big dairy guy,” Williams cut out ice cream. And doughnuts. And chips.

Otherwise, regular, daily exercise — the stationery bike, treadmill or elliptical machine, or simply shooting around, or just walking — began yielding immediate dividends.

As he dropped weight fairly rapidly, Williams had to be managed. On top of Purdue monitoring his nutrition and hydration, as it would any athlete, Roberts kept in communication with Williams to make sure he was feeling well.

“If you’re gaining weight, you’re at a calorie surplus and if you’re losing weight, you’re at a calorie deficit,” Roberts said. “We wanted to put him at a calorie deficit, but not to the point where he couldn’t perform and do what he needed to do every day.”

In time, as weight was shed, Williams’ conditioning improved, obviously. But so did his energy, and his attention span.

“I had a lot of weight on me, and it was kind of hard to focus when I was fatigued,” Williams said. “Coach talks a lot about that, and it’s hard. You have a lot of plays to learn, the system. It’s tough for me to focus when I’m fatigued.That’s one thing I’ve worked on — to do as much extra on the side as I can do, whether it’s film, watching extra clips, whatever it might be.”

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Though results came fairly quickly for Williams, he entered the season still with a long way to go.

And so when it came time to play, he didn’t.

He played just four minutes in the season-opener against Fairfield despite the lop-sided score. In the Charleston Classic, he played one, five and two minutes, respectively, in three blowouts, then didn’t leave the bench against Virginia Tech in the title game.

But after a 4-for-4 shooting showing in seven garbage-time minutes against Robert Morris, Williams started slipping onto the floor, in first halves.

Then, Notre Dame happened.

The Crossroads Classic was a thoroughly forgettable day for Purdue, the lone exception being the freshman big man’s sudden emergence. The score was what it was, but coaches always enjoy seeing players capitalize on opportunities no matter their form, and Williams did just that.

Not only did Purdue put him in the game, but it got him the ball, and Williams rewarded it by making five of his six shots and finishing with 10 points and four rebounds in only nine minutes, the sort of astronomical per-minute productivity he’s been able to maintain ever since.

Against Ohio next time out, he grabbed eight rebounds in 12 minutes.

After playing only 13 minutes combined against Belmont and Iowa, Williams went for 13 and 12 in 21 minutes at Michigan State, then nine and 11 in 26 minutes at Wisconsin.

Frame of reference: Williams played 22 minutes in November.

Now, he’s playing 23-and-a-half minutes, on average, in two of the Big Ten’s foremost road-venue snake-pits and falling just a point shy of back-to-back double-doubles.

That part, that’s not necessarily a surprise to Williams, he says.

“That’s my game,” he said, “but when you have so much weight on you, it holds you back.”

Williams is better conditioned, and thus more agile, and quicker, complementing the agility and quickness in another sense that have contributed to his success, too.

Whether he’s passing the ball or defending, Williams seems to see things coming.

The defensive end of the floor remains an area for growth, but he’s making plays. At Wisconsin, he jumped a post entry for a steal, then snared a cross-court pass from the lane on another occasion. At least once, Williams countered Ethan Happ’s clever post moves with an “unconventional” blocked shot that “surprised” the Badger star, as Painter put it.

The freshman has been highly productive since becoming a front-line player in-season and has made Purdue demonstrably better, at an opportune moment given Evan Boudreaux’s injury.

It’s been one of the stories of Purdue’s season to date, but also a reflection of immense promise for a player who figures to be a foundational presence for the Boilermakers from here on out.

But though he’s come so far, he’s not there yet.

“I think he’s a ways away still, about 20 more pounds (to lose), and (he has to continue to) get functionally strong and move better laterally,” Painter said. “I think losing 20 more would really help him. If he can get to 250-255, very similar to Swanigan, you lose so much and then you think you can’t go any further, but I think he can.

“I think that’s where he needs to be if he wants to be one of the better players in our league.”

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