With his second act, Dave Williams has Desert Vista girls basketball on brink of state's first Open Division championship

Just off Baseline Road, where the church spires rise up like smokestacks of hope, there’s an austere little building. It’s also a church, or at least it was.

Nowadays, the 40 red bricks that used to form a cross over the main entrance have mostly been ripped out, replaced by mortar or nothing at all. The blue and white sign that welcomed congregants to Baseline Missionary Baptist Church is gone, too. A coat of brown paint has slowly chipped off the gable roof, revealing the wooden frame that Paul and Frankie Williams built here, back in the 1980s.

Not much else remains, but their names do, still engraved on a granite sign that holds the details to the building’s past life.

Organized December 30, 1984. Built 1988. Founder/organizer Rev. Paul C. Williams Sr. Church clerk Sis. Frankie Jean Williams. And right there in the center, the names of the 13 charter members. Paul, Frankie, their eight kids and three spouses. That’s it. That’s the circle.

The very first name on the list is David Williams. Like his siblings, he was an adult when the church went up. By 1988, he had already finished up his playing career at Oklahoma City University, gone on to serve as a volunteer assistant under John Shumate at Grand Canyon and begun his own coaching career as an assistant at South Mountain Community College.

But to understand Dave Williams, the basketball coach, you have to backtrack and understand Paul and Frankie Williams, the people.

While Frankie was growing up in Memphis, Tennessee, Paul was coming of age a hundred or so miles to the north, in Caruthersville, Missouri. He had been born into the Depression, a Black child in the Jim Crow South. Before he could finish middle school, he went to work, helping support his family. Only with Dave’s help three decades later did he eventually earn his eighth grade diploma.

Together, Paul and Frankie moved to Phoenix, determined to create a better life for their children. Frankie found work as a nurse. Paul went into ministry, ingraining his family in the ideals of the South Phoenix Baptist Church. The great joy of his work was forging a sense of community, which is why he always wanted to start a congregation of his own.

Growing up in Paul and Frankie’s household, that ethos got passed down to the Williams kids. “That's what I see and that's what I know,” Dave said.

At its heart, that’s why he turned a childhood love of basketball into a lifetime of coaching.

“I always say that's our ministry,” Dave said. “Helping these young ladies, helping these young men get on the right track and using basketball as a hook. Because once they get in here, it's a different world. People say, ‘Damn, coach is nuts.’ No, I just want everything done the right way. I want accountability. I want professionalism. And I want you to get it done.”

When Dave says that motto, ‘Get it done,’ will be engraved on his tombstone one day, it’s hard to believe he’s telling anything but the truth. It came from the on-court play of the guards he grew up idolizing, like Walt Frazier and Norm Nixon. But it also came from the role models in his own life, none more so than Paul. “Oh yeah,” Dave said. “Dad got it done. He'd get it done all the time.”

'It was a tough whammy'

These days, Williams is fulfilling that mission with the girls’ team at Desert Vista High School in Ahwatukee. He's coached the Thunder to the No. 1 ranking in the state and a berth in Saturday’s Open Division championship game. For all of that on-court success, Williams is just as proud to coach a team where 10 of his 14 players have GPAs of 3.8 or above.

“That’s a great thing right there,” Williams said, recovering from the type of laugh parents break into when recounting their kids’ accomplishments. Three years into his stint with the Desert Vista girls, that’s how Williams views his team. “I wouldn't give them up for nobody,” he said.

That wasn’t how he always saw it.

A decade ago, Williams was in the midst of a four-year stint as the school’s boys coach and happy doing it. The Thunder went 73-44 in those years, earning four playoff appearances and one trip to the Division I semis. The sense of entitlement from parents bothered him, but he loved the job and thought he’d coach boys forever.

Even in 2012, when Paul’s health began to fail, basketball was Williams’ reprieve.

“It’s a little window where I can think about something else,” he said at the time. “Basketball has been one of the things to get me through all of this.”

That summer, Paul died at age 79. A year and a half later, Frankie died, too. “It was a tough whammy,” Williams said, his mind drifting back to the memories he still guards with all his might.

At the time, he had no choice but to step back from basketball. He kept his AAU team and retained his post teaching health at Desert Vista, but stepped down from the Thunder’s basketball program. “It killed me,” Williams said, but with his siblings dispersed across the country and tied down by family responsibilities, he was the one left to look over the church.

“It wasn't something that I said, give me basketball or give me this,” Williams said. “No, somebody's gotta show attention to this because he put a lot of time into that and had a really good organization and a good situation and there was nobody else.”

So for six years, that’s what Williams did. It didn’t take long for other schools to start calling, inquiring about a return but, as he puts it, “I just wasn't ready for that. I just needed a break.”

Frankly, he wasn’t sure he was ready for his current job either when it opened in spring 2020.

“He really didn't want to do it,” Duane Casey, Williams’ longtime assistant and one of his most trusted friends, said. Ultimately, Casey was the one who convinced Williams of the proposition, the day his application was due.

What he learned coaching girls

Part of Williams’ hesitancy came from uncertainty about the prospect of coaching girls, something he had never done.

“The way I like to push, we've gotta be highly motivated,” Williams said. “Your motor's gotta be an eight-cylinder, not a two-cylinder. … I didn't know if they could handle that eight-cylinder action that we do.”

Quickly, he realized his misconception. That first team was raw, to put it nicely. Seven of 12 contributors were freshmen. Only one had played meaningful varsity minutes. “They weren't at the level that we were looking for,” Williams said.

But the one attribute they never lacked was motivation. With COVID still shuttering gyms and the status of the season uncertain, they practiced in Pecos Park, running hills and working out on faded blacktops. By the end of the season’s first month, Williams was sold on his new group.

“I've found out that girls listen better,” Williams said. “They're a little bit more mentally coachable. The mental side of it is a little bit different compared to boys, (who think) ‘I just want to dunk on you and I just want to make you fall.’ These girls, they bought into our system and they trust the process and they know the source of our victories is gonna be pressure, getting it out and shooting the heck out of the ball, which we do.”

Plus, Williams himself is different now.

“He's changed,” Casey said. “He's mellowed down. He doesn't get as fiery as he once did. It's come to the point he'll say, ‘Case, I'm not gonna worry about that.’ (I say), ‘I've been trying to tell you to do that a long time.’ This is good, that's progress,”

At times, Casey fears Williams has gone too soft. “I've never seen him so concerned about the girls' feelings as this year,” Casey said. For the most part, Casey sees that as a positive. Sometimes, though, he worries Williams rotates too quickly, resting his starters before games are out of hand.

If the problem exists, it hasn’t been too pronounced. Desert Vista is 23-0 against in-state opponents. Their closest game was a nine-point win back in January.

“He's really lets us play our game and lets us get our chemistry together, getting it going,” freshman Jerzy Robinson, Desert Vista’s leading scorer, said. “I think that's been the main factor to leading us to the (championship).”

Show this version of Williams to Casey when they first met, back in 2001, and he might not have believed you. Even in 2014, it would have been a stretch. Because this version of himself, Williams said, was forged during those six years away from the high school game.

“It was tough,” Williams said. “But you know what, when I look back now, dang I grew so much. Because I started looking at the big picture compared to just wins and losses. I started looking at, there is another life out there besides basketball.”

Back in that other life, there remains one final unresolved task: What to do with Paul and Frankie’s property off Baseline. Basketball is back at the forefront now, but Williams wants to build there someday. Family homes, maybe. Something affordable, definitely.

“To help others,” Williams said. “That's what he wanted. That's what they wanted.”

Theo Mackie covers Arizona high school sports and the Arizona Diamondbacks. He can be reached by email at theo.mackie@gannett.com and on Twitter @theo_mackie.

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This article originally appeared on Arizona Republic: At Desert Vista, Dave Williams carries a family legacy