Elias Williams doesn’t need more motivation to be great. He sees his motivation every day.
Williams draws his drive from his parents. They've been busting their butts since before they met to support themselves and later their family of four which includes Elias and his little brother Travis Williams Jr.
Their mother, Maria Williams, has been working since she was 13 years old, doing odd jobs until she could get a job at McDonalds at 17 in 2002. A job she would stay at for 21 years, becoming a store manager in the process.
Meanwhile, their dad, Travis Williams Sr., used to work in fast food at McDonald's and Checkers and becoming an assistant manager along the way. He then transitioned to working on guard rails and has added several odd jobs to support the family. That's because, in 2023, Maria had to quit working.
It wasn’t necessarily a choice she wanted to make but her then six-year battle with diabetes was catching up to her. That and gastroparesis, a symptom of diabetes that affects proper digestion.
“When it comes to gastroparesis, I have a lot of bad days with that,” Maria said. “Usually, that involves a lot of nausea and throwing up to the point where you get dehydrated. Sometimes my medicine will work and I can just keep going. Other times it doesn't work and the only way for me to feel better 一 I usually lay down all day and basically sleep and throw up. That type of deal. It usually takes a few days 一 because I get dehydrated 一 to be able to get any food in my system and then it takes me a couple of days to get back going.”
She wouldn't just miss work but family functions, practices, games, holiday hangouts and even Elias’ signing day.
“It was kind of bittersweet because I wasn't there physically (for Early National Signing Day),” Maria said. “I was on a FaceTime call with family. I have a group of female friends that are his aunties that when I really need them, they come through so they were able to go for them.
"I did feel a certain type of way because I felt like I was letting him down by not being there. But it also gives me motivation to keep fighting and just trying to take care of myself to be better for him. So, I can be able to see more future accomplishments because I know that's not the only good thing for him.”
Before her diagnosis when her sons were playing Pop Warner football, she had a hectic work schedule that somewhat depended on whether the boys had a road or home game.
For Saturday home games, she'd work from 5 a.m. to 9 a.m., eat, pick the boys up and take them where they needed to go and watch the game. Then she'd get the kids fed and settled in before returning to work another shift. Then, finally, she'd work a Sunday morning shift.
She did all of that so she could have Saturday off to attend road games.
Elias remembers and appreciates things like that. When she stopped being able to attend as many events, he took it in stride and just found a new way of including her in things.
“I always 一 no matter where, anytime, especially after the day, I'll give her a call to see how she's doing and make sure she's doing well,” Elias said. “Every single time before I step out on the field, I always give my parents a call because they're very close to me.”
Football started out being a fun hobby but now it’s something bigger to him. It’s his why. It’s what keeps him going.
“My grind and passion to play football I get from my father," Elias said. "Being at a young age and my mom not working, he kind of had to pick up the slack. So, he was working two jobs to support the family and everything. Just seeing the kind of work my dad put in has that feeling of you don't want your parents to stress about paying the bills or whether they're able to feed their family tonight or not.”
The four-star Hudson (Fla.) product’s mindset doesn’t surprise Maria. They’ve been close since he was in the womb and she knew he was destined to be special and a football player on the day she birthed him.
“I had a feeling that he was meant to do something big. What it was? I don't know, but I always had that feeling with him,” Maria said. “It's actually funny that he's good at football because in the nursery when I had him in the hospital, they called him the linebacker because he came out weighing nine pounds, 14 ounces.
“They announced it over the speaker system. They called him the linebacker. ‘The linebacker weighs nine pounds, 14 ounces.’ Because he was a C-section they were still working on me and the nurse is like, ‘Did you hear that? That's your baby.’ And I said, ‘Oh, that’s pretty cool.’”
“That's when I knew that me and football were together for life.”
Before Elias got into football he was described as a happy baby and kid who never presented any problems to his parents. He was so good, Maria half-jokingly wished he would do something a little bad just to see if he could.
That same personality would follow him throughout his childhood and to the start of his Pop Warner career. It wasn’t until a month before his ninth birthday that he began to play football. One day, the Williams family was on their way home when they passed a field with some kids dressed in pads and helmets and decided to check out what was happening.
When they went up to the coach, he was excited to see Elias, who was bigger than most kids his age. But Elias didn’t like football at first, mostly because they rushed him on the field and didn’t let him get the week of conditioning the other kids got.
“Usually they’re supposed to do some conditioning before they put him in pads and helmets,” Maria said. “They just straight-up put him in pads and a helmet because they were so excited about his size. He was one of the bigger kids on the team, but actually was one of the younger kids on the team.”
Having already paid for Elias to play, he and his parents agreed that if he didn’t want to play following the season they’d find something else for him. But a conversation with his parents on the way to a practice one day helped change his perspective.
“He's always been a gentle giant. That's what we noticed," Maria said. "Sometimes, he would tackle the kids where they fell on him. So, we're in the car and we're just talking before we get to practice and we're like, ‘Kids, this is a time to take advantage. If mommy and daddy make you mad, you take it out on the field. You can't hit us but you can hit the other kids.”
Subsequently, at practice, Elias participated in an Oklahoma drill that made him fall in love with the sport.
“I hit the kid and then after I got a stinger, and my arm started hurting but it was over after that,” Elias said proudly. “That's when I knew that me and football were together for life.”
It wasn’t until colleges started noticing Elias later in high school that his parents grasped just how talented he was and that his talent could take him places. But just like his Pop Warner coach, Hudson head coach Tim Hicks had the same curiosity and excitement about Elias when he met him in seventh grade.
“I saw him for the first time and was like, ‘Who is that giant human being over there,?'” Hicks asked his assistant coach, who ran the league Elias played in. “He was probably six foot tall and 170-180 pounds maybe, in the seventh grade. It was very obvious then 一 I knew that everything that's happened over the last couple of years was going to happen. Like there was no question, you could tell he was that much better and bigger than everybody else.”
Hicks, who just finished his seventh season as Hudson’s head coach, admitted that Williams is still raw but that he has the highest ceiling of any player he’s ever coached and is the most dominant player he’s ever coached. That was evident throughout his high school career.
“I mean, just as far as like disrupting a game or whatever, yeah, he's the best player I've ever coached,” Hicks said. “You have to triple-team him.
“As a freshman, before anybody knew who he was, we go to a playoff game and he had four sacks. As a sophomore, nobody really knows who he is. He goes out and gets nine or 10 sacks. As a junior, they started kind of, ‘Oh, well that’s Elias let’s start double-teaming him.’ So then he gets seven or eight and this year, he was triple-teamed, whatever they could do to him, and he still would be disruptive.”
In his senior season, Elias recorded 42 tackles, 9.5 tackles for loss, seven sacks, five forced fumbles, five fumble recoveries, four pass deflections and a blocked field goal. But what stands out in Hicks’ mind more than any athletic feat Elias displayed on the gridiron was his outlook on life and the type of leader he is on and off the field.
“He's never been mad,” Hicks recalled. “He's never not had a smile on his face. Regardless of what's going on on the field, during the game, in the hallways or in a classroom, the kid loves life and makes the most of it. And it's amazing. And every time I talk about it, I get chills because you don't find that. There's never an up or down with him ever.
“There's only been one time where Elias has ever raised his voice during a game, and that was his junior year, second round of the playoffs. We were down by about 28 and a couple of our seniors were being knuckleheads. And Elias raised his voice and said, ‘We don't do that. We lose with class,' and everybody just shut up. And he's never done it any other time before. But the time he did that everybody was like, ‘Okay.’ Even the seniors that were older than him, they're like, ‘Alright, well, if he said that, then we better do it.’”
"We don't give a damn. We want him."
For Elias, it’s all about relationships, and during his recruitment, Missouri proved to the 6-foot-4, 258-pounder that relationships are just as important to them. Elias recalls Hicks calling him and telling him that Mizzou should be his school based on a phone conversation Hicks had with a Missouri coach.
“He's like, ‘Listen, I'll never tell you anywhere to go. But I just got off the phone with one of the coaches from Missouri,’" Elias recalled Hicks telling him in their own phone conversation. "I told them, ‘Well, he is kind of having a grade issue right now.’
“He told me the coach said, and I quote, ‘We don't give a damn. We want him. We don’t give a damn about his grades. We want him.’”
Out of context, it looks like the Tigers were saying they’d take Elias regardless of his grades but that couldn’t be further from the truth. They were actually committed to helping him do better in the classroom in any way they could.
That was the first of several things Mizzou did that the Williams family liked.
“They kind of coached him through, and I think that's good because they're not just waiting for him to get there to get involved," Maria said. "They're trying to be involved now, and just make sure that he's keeping his classes and stuff on track.”
Another thing Missouri did was it wowed the family during Elias’ official visit last June.
“When we were at the Missouri field, they showed us a presentation that had even me want to come here and play football and I don't even know how to play football,” Maria said enthusiastically. “But that's how exciting that presentation was.”
“Missouri is pure and genuine,” Travis Sr. said. “We know that they don't want Elias just for football. They want to help Elias go to the next step. From a young man to a man. To down the road possibly a father. With that being said, we didn't take another second picking Missouri. Of course, this is where Elias was going to be going for the next three to four years. But for us to know that he has just a support team to help him unconditionally 一 there was no hesitation.”
That was really when Elias knew he wanted to be a Tiger. He was going to commit before he left the official visit but his mom told him to give it a day to make sure. The next day he was still excited and knew he wanted to be a Tiger but didn't commit right then. However, he did move his commitment day from December to early September.
Even when defensive coordinator Blake Baker and EDGE coach Kevin Peoples surprised him by departing for LSU in early January his desire to come to Mizzou never wavered. Once he started talking to new EDGE coach Brian Early his mind was at ease.
“I asked him what position I'd play, and everything he told me was exactly what I wanted to hear,” Elias said. “He said he wanted me to be a field player. And I could tell he was doing his research on me because he called my play style out exactly. Like the way I tell everybody is exactly what he said to me.
“The conversation we had felt genuine. There was a time when we weren't even talking about football anymore. He was just talking about me as a person and how I’m doing in life.”
When Elias arrives in the summer he won’t be alone for too long. He'll not only have the brotherhood of the roster, but his family has plans to move to Missouri before the season starts to be close by and ensure he doesn’t get homesick.
But they may not have to stay in the state too long, as the Tigers think he may be playing on Sundays sooner than later.
“The Tigers are getting a good one,” Hicks said. “They’ve been telling me since day one they figure he’s going to be there for three years and then he'll be gone.”
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