Mogadore standout Mason Williams commits to play football at Ohio University

MOGADORE — For all the victories the Wildcats have racked up, year after year, decade after decade, they've had a limited number of Division I football players.

That's what made Mogadore senior Mason Williams so unique as he started to rack up Mid-American Conference offers last year.

Wildcats coach Matt Adorni realized that Williams was a different kind of recruit when Ohio State came calling, including offensive coordinator and tight ends coach Kevin Wilson and receivers coach Brian Hartline.

"It really hit me the day Brian Hartline is in our hallway of our high school," Adorni said. "That's when it kind of hit me like, 'Wow, this is a pretty serious recruitment.'"

Ultimately, Williams found himself strongly considering a number of MAC schools, with Buffalo, Kent State and Ohio among his top choices, and the tight end picking the Bobcats.

And the Mogadore senior understands that his commitment was big not just for him, but for the village that raised him.

"Going to college, getting it paid for, it's really a big thing for this town," Williams said. "It's a really big football town. They love to see someone come out of here going big."

Mason Williams sees a spike in interest after his junior season

It took time for the colleges to find Williams.

Even though he was a factor for the Wildcats from the very beginning, starting at tight end as a freshman.

He also quickly made a name for himself on the defensive line, earning second team all-state last year.

"Last year was definitely a big year," Williams said. "My freshman, sophomore years, I didn't get a lot of college exposure. I was going to camps and everything. Nothing really happened, but last year, it really started to blow up. People started coming talking to me, wanted me to come to camps and coming to visits and stuff."

In truth, Williams was hard to ignore as a junior.

He mastered a new role for the football team, taking on carries after longtime star running back Tyler Knight was injured, capped by a six-touchdown performance in a Region 21 semifinal victory over LaBrae.

Conventional thinking suggests all that time at running back might detract from Williams' recruitment as a tight end.

It turned out the opposite was true.

"They love to see the ball in his hands, and the more they could see the ball in his hands, no matter how it got in his hands, they could visualize yards after catch," Adorni said of college coaches. "They wanted to see him run routes and do tight end things, too, for them that they're going to do, but they also love to see his blocking."

Williams wound up with tape that showed off his many talents, including a perfect mix of grace and physicality.

"Through this recruitment process, some of these guys are listed tight ends but they're really like flexed receivers that are basically basketball players in the slot and they don't get real physical, don't get dirty," Adorni said. "These coaches to a man loved that they could see him get dirty on our film but then also do some of the pretty things."

There's also a line of thinking that specializing in one sport is the best way to land a college scholarship, but Adorni said that a number of the college coaches he talked to were enthused by Williams' contributions on the basketball court, where he was a center with a soft shooting touch that helped lead the Wildcats to a share of the PTC title, and the diamond, where he was a key reason that Mogadore finished 8-2 in league play.

Heck, Adorni recalled a workout he put on for college coaches at Mogadore Memorial Stadium where someone tossed a baseball Williams' way (that was not part of the planned workout) and the pitcher/infielder gracefully bent down, picked the ball up, spun and fired it back. A nearby Division I coach smiled at that one, clearly impressed.

Indeed, as far as Adorni is concerned, Williams' recruitment journey shattered a number of myths.

"It's just not true this belief that you got to go bigger, you got to go somewhere else to be seen and this just proves that all those people are false," Adorni said. "If you're good enough, they'll find you, especially in this day and age of Twitter and taping everything."

Patience proves to be a virtue for Mason Williams

As Mason Williams waited for the interest from college programs to develop, his family helped him through those eerily quiet days, before the offers materialized and the visits began.

Williams happens to be part of a family that knows the college process well, with his older brother, Austin, recently wrapping up his college football career at Ashland University. His father, Chris, also played college football, at Toledo, and his mother, Theresa, played softball for the Rockets.

"Having my brother and my parents definitely helped," Williams said. "They knew how the process was going to work, how it was going to help, and it was a little stressful wondering where I was going to show out, when and where it was going to come first, but it all worked out in the end."

Williams said that he learned a particularly powerful lesson from his older brother's recruitment, which also got off to a slow start. Ashland ultimately discovered him somewhat by accident, when it was scouting someone else.

"It really helped me learn that I have to play hard every play because I never know who's watching," Mason Williams said. "So if there's a coach there watching somebody else, they might see me, so that's something I picked up."

As Williams' recruitment heated up, the MAC stood out to him. Williams found himself particularly torn between the Bobcats and Golden Flashes. He loved the coaches at both schools. One of the tiebreakers ended up being distance.

"It was such a good fit at OU in terms of their schemes and the things that they're trying to do down there and I think he wanted to get a little bit away from home but not too far, which is what OU is," Adorni said. "It's a world away, but it's also a short drive home really in the grand scheme of things."

A world away from Athens, Williams still has one more season for a Wildcats team that shook off a season-ending injury to Knight and an extremely young defense to earn a share of the PTC title and a Region 21 runner-up trophy last year. This 2022 Mogadore team boasts an experienced quarterback (Zeke Cameron), key returners on the line like Tyler Shellenbarger and intriguing athletes ready to step to the fore like Devin Graham and Nick Stephenson.

And they have a unique athlete in Williams, whose character shown through in the twilight of Friday's practice.

There Williams ran with four teammates under an increasingly hot morning sun because he had messed something up at the previous day's practice and answered honestly when a coach asked if he had run yet.

Williams didn't just accept his punishment.

He embraced it, winning every single race.

That's really just who Mason Williams is.

"It's a big thing in my family," Williams said of winning those post-practice races. "We've always competed. We're a bunch of athletes, so competing and competitiveness is something I've always grown up with."