Feel-good tale
Greenfield lineman has ‘The Blind Side’-like story
Prior to the 2020 prep football season, the Journal Sentinel will reveal the Supreme 17, a look at the top players in the area. Each day before the first day of practice Sept. 6, one player will be revealed with a feature story. This is our ninth installment.
Jalonnie Williams is proud of his story.
Just over one year ago, Williams was without a permanent home at the age of 16. He spent much of the summer of 2019 bouncing around from couch-to-couch at other people's houses, spending a couple of days at someone's home before finding another place to crash. He is well aware of all the different avenues to which he could have turned.
“A lot of people in that situation just fold,” Williams said. “They just convert to violence, drugs, gangs. I didn't want to be like that.”
He made an effort to surround himself with the right friends and always had sports to keep him occupied, playing baseball and basketball constantly while growing up and picked up football as a sophomore at Greenfield High School.
It was through football that Williams, a defensive end, formed bonds and met many of his closest friends.
It was also where he found a home.
Finding a new family
Kristin Fenske doesn't always like equating her family's situation to “The Blind Side,” but it's hard for her to not draw the parallels.
In the book by Michael Lewis that was adapted into a popular movie, a white family takes in Michael Oher, a Black high school student in Tennessee without a home. Along the way, he develops into an NCAA Division I football recruit as an offensive lineman.
Williams was moving around to different friends' houses to spend the night before Kristin and the Fenskes invited him to move in with them permanently. Soon thereafter, he also developed into a D-I college football recruit.
“You don't want to say it's just like the movie, but it's definitely a similar situation,” Fenske said.
Williams was teammates and friends with Carson Fenske, an offensive lineman for the Hawks, so he was already familiar with the family. With nowhere else to go last summer, Williams slept over at their home for three days, then crashed at four other teammates' places over the next few weeks.
Williams then came back to the Fenskes' for what he thought were going to be just a couple of more nights before he would head off somewhere else. Then the family asked if they could talk with him in their living room.
“I was staying here and I was sleeping, then Carson comes up and says, ‘My mom wants to talk to you when you get a chance,'” Williams said. “I knew I didn't do anything wrong, so it was either they didn't want me to stay there or wanted me to leave.”
The message from the Fenskes, of course, was that they wanted to offer Williams, whom they call “Jay,” a chance to move in permanently to their Milwaukee home if he wanted to. “I almost cried,” Williams said. Said Kristin: “He wasn't in a very good situation, so we talked about it and said, ‘Hey, we've got an extra room. He went from sleeping at people's houses to being a permanent guest at our house.”
The Fenskes had known Williams from the time he had already spent over at their house. That made the decision to have him move in with the family, which includes Kristin, her husband, Tim, and their three children a “pretty easy” one.
“He's had a unique situation in life and it's not always been easy for him,” Kristin said. “People want to help him because he's a good kid. You see who he is and that naturally makes people want to help. They see the potential in him as a person and also as a football player, but especially as a person, and the future that he can have.”
Williams remains in regular communication with his birth mother, Jamekeya, as well. He says that he now sees that his situation has played out as "a blessing."
“I've got two moms and it's great,” Williams said.
Becoming a Division I prospect
In just over a year at the Fenske household, Williams has put on more than 50 pounds. That wouldn't be optimal for every person, but when you're a defensive end that wants to play in college but only weighed 220 pounds before, it's a good thing.
Now 6-foot-5 and 275 pounds, Williams now looks the part of a high-level defensive lineman.
“A lot of colleges actually say that putting on that weight was good for football because, if I was still as small as I used to be, they wouldn't have recruited me,” Williams said.
Living with the Fenskes has aided Williams' recruitment in more ways than just being able to eat Kristin's barbecue ribs and baked mac and cheese, his favorite meal.
Despite his size, Williams plays fast and was able to succeed lined up as either a defensive end or a three-technique. Jonah Fenske, who at 15-yearsold Williams refers to as “my little brother,” watched closely last fall as Williams dominated his way to a second consecutive first-team all-conference selection.
Thinking Williams should have more colleges interested in him, Jonah reached out to analysts at multiple recruiting sites to let them know about a hidden gem at Greenfield. They ultimately responded and, soon, Williams was ranked by both 247 and ESPN.
“I always tell (Jonah) that he's going to be my agent when I make it to the NFL now,” Williams said.
Williams credits the recognition from those platforms as a critical step in his recruitment. Prior to that, he had emailed more than 70 colleges “just trying to get a scholarship.” He heard back from nearly half, but none of them had good news to offer.
“One of my coaches told me that I couldn't expect for colleges to come and get me,” Williams said. “I was a noname.”
After Williams became ranked, however, Division II Northern State was the first school to have interest in him, Iowa State visited him at school and Central Michigan became the first Football Bowl Subdivision program to offer a scholarship. The recruitment ball was rolling.
Williams and the Fenskes both consulted his birth mother throughout his recruitment to make sure he would choose the right school for him.
Through listening to the advice from both of his families and a heavy recruiting effort from Northern Illinois, Williams committed to the program following a campus visit last week.
“I have 12 postcards from NIU that they sent me within two weeks up in my room right now,” he said. “...We went down last Friday and I liked the campus, even though it's sort of in the middle of nowhere. I liked that the team looked really close. I loved the atmosphere.”
Going from not playing football until he was a sophomore, to not having a place to stay, to accepting a Division I scholarship, the last couple of years have been a whirlwind for Williams.
“Honestly, I never would've thought that I could play college football at any level,” he said.
Williams has done just that, though, and now he has found his home for when he goes to college – just like he did with the Fenskes.