John Williams IV never really left Spring Arbor. Even when he stepped away from his role as an assistant coach with the womens basketball team after the 2017-18 season, he was still an assistant professor of education and Dean of the School of Education.
He left to take over the Homer girls basketball program, but SAU called him back and he felt he needed to go.
“I’m a Spring Arbor alumn. I love this place. My wife went here. My dad’s been teaching here over 30 years,” Williams said. “I love Spring Arbor. Even when I was here playing soccer, in the offseason I was a student assistant for the womens basketball program and I’d be on a scout team running other teams’ sets and defensive packages for the womens team to scrimmage off.”
To him, Spring Arbor is not a stepping stone to something bigger. The Cougars job is the one he wanted.
“I’m not trying to make it big at Spring Arbor in a year or two or three and then go off to an even bigger school,” he said. “I’m trying to retire from Spring Arbor and coach here for 20, 25 years. This is where my family lives. This is what we love. Just trying to make Spring Arbor womens basketball the premier Christian womens basketball program, first in Michigan and then hopefully in the midwest.”
He has already gotten started putting the program together at Spring Arbor. Alex Scott, a former Spring Arbor player who was an assistant coach under Williams at Homer, joined him as an assistant coach. Other members of the coaching staff will be announced soon.
He is hitting the recruiting trail and bringing in talent from the Jackson area, such as Leslie’s Emma Smieska and Stockbridge’s Gwen Rogozinski. Springport native Alana Nelson transferred in from Northwood. In addition to those local talents, Williams went south of the stateline to bring in Gloria Miller from LaGrange, Indiana.
“The previous coaches before me did a great job of recruiting as well,” Williams said. “There are a few different signees. Technically of the 26 players in our program, 13 will be new to Spring Arbor this upcoming season.”
Since then he’s gotten to work on next year’s recruiting class as well, traveling by his estimate 1,500 to 1,600 miles in the last few weeks with trips planned in the near future to tournaments in Indianapolis and Louisville. Spring Arbor has also hosted open gyms on Thursdays for Cougar players as well as others.
The Cougars under Williams will play up-tempo while working on a team-oriented approach in the half-court offense.
“We’ll mix between a four-out, one-in and five-out style where we’ll do a lot of read-and-react, pass-cut-pass, and then attack the paint,” he said. “If you can get to the rim, great, if not you’re going to kick it opposite.”
Defensively he hopes for relentlessness, mixing in some zone but doing a lot of full-court pressure.
“When we recruit, we tell people we are recruiting dogs,” he said. “We have to have someone that’s legit ready to guard a high-level athlete. In the Crossroads, I think it’s the best womens basketball league in the nation in NAIA. There’s a lot of high-level D-II players, low-level D-I, that transfer into our league, so we need players that can guard that level of athlete.”
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