TACKLING A SPORT QUICKLY
Westbury alum Williams excels at rugby after football career
Kevon Williams never set his sights on becoming an Olympic athlete, certainly not in the unique game of rugby sevens, which he will play in Tokyo as part of the United States national team known as the Eagles.
Williams, 30, wanted only to compete in something at the highest level. He will do so in Tokyo, the latest stop in an unusual journey that took him from southwest Houston to New Mexico, Denver, San Diego and points abroad and from American football to rugby.
“The first thing I liked about rugby is that you can do everything,” he said. “You can play offense. You can play defense. Everyone needs to be able to pass the ball. Everyone has to run. Everyone has to be fit. Minus kicking, everybody has to be able to do essentially the same thing.”
played football and ran track at Westbury High School, graduating in 2009, and played in college at New Mexico Highlands, where he led the Cowboys in receptions three years in a row. He found himself at sea, however, when he changed his academic major and continued in school after exhausting his football eligibility.
“I picked up rugby as a hobby,” he said. “I had been a team athlete my entire life, and I wasn’t sure if I would like having free time. I needed something to keep myself busy.”
The football-to-rugby transition is not common at higher levels — only four of 12 members of the Olympic team did not play the game in high school — but Williams proved a quick study.
His performance for New Mexico Highlands’ club team at a tournament in Nebraska in 2013 caught the eye of a scout for the Denver Renegades, who recruited him to play professionally.
“It’s a lot of work, watching films to try to understand the game,” he said. “Anybody can run with the ball. You can only pass it laterally or backward. You can kick it forward, but everyone has to be behind the ball before you kick it.
“Then you have to be able to understand the game inside and out and be able to execute that knowledge on the run, which is the hardest part.”
Williams was too green to stick with the national team on his first tryout but in 2016 made his international debut at a tournament in Dubai. He now lives in San Diego, where he trains with the Eagles.
“It’s been amazing to watch his growth,” said team captain Madison Hughes. “You could tell that he had tremendous potential. His pace and his footwork were immediately apparent. To see his improved knowledge of the game is amazing, and he gives us a dynamic presence.”
Rugby sevens is a scaleddown version of the traditional game, played on a standard field with seven players per side rather than 15 and seven-minute halves plus stoppage time rather than two 40-minute periods.
Scrums — the interlocked clinches that begin play after penalties or stoppages in action — involve three players rather than eight, and the smaller team sizes result in more wide-open play and higher scoring.
Quick decisions on the run are essential, which Williams said plays into his background as a slot receiver in football.
“We had the option to run different route combinations based on coverages,” he said. “You don’t know what the coverage is until you’re running the route, so you have to make decisions on the fly.
“Rugby is like that. The picture can change in an in Williams stant, and you have to change, too.”
Williams is the scrum halfback, feeding the ball into the middle of the interlocked scrum players and then dashing toward the back of the pileup to field the ball and feed it to players in the open field.
“I’m a playmaker, so I have to read the field,” he said. “I bring acceleration and versatility, which helps.”
When Williams left behind football for rugby, he left behind pads as well. Rugby players don’t wear them, and the game has a reputation as a fearsomely physical affair.
“People think it’s just players throwing their bodies at each other,” he said. “But the person making the tackle is trying to protect his body just as much as the player with the ball. We spend a lot of time on tackling technique.”
The United States’ best finish in the annual rugby World Cup was sixth place in 2018. South Africa beat England for the 2019 cup title, and Fiji, Great Britain and South Africa were the 2016 Olympic medalists.
“Kevon is very effective in terms or organizing and moving players around on defense,” said USA coach Mike Friday. “He’s a great communicator. I guess another way of saying is that he likes to talk a lot. He’s a positive character.”
At 30, Williams is in the latter stages of his career but hopes to remain active through the 2022 World Cup in South Africa. He has an undergraduate degree in computer science and is working on an MBA degree through a program offered by the U.S. Olympic and Paralympic Committee.
Once rugby ends, he and his family hope to return to Houston, where his parents, Kenneth and Brenda Williams, still live.
“I don’t plan on playing until I break,” he said. “I’ll go through (2022) and see how my body feels and what my wife thinks, and then we’ll go from there.”