In Derryk Williams, Syracuse has a head coach in the making

Derryk Williams thought he had it all figured out. It was the fall of 2015, he was 22 years old and had just won his first game as a head coach of Ithaca College’s club volleyball team.

Williams wasn’t supposed to be in that role. He was a first-year assistant coming off four years as an undersized and “pretty bad” middle blocker with the Bombers. But just a month into his first season as a coach, Wiliams was thrust into the interim role after head coach Janet Donovan took a leave of absence with appendicitis.

He had little idea about what he was doing. Yet facing Ithaca’s rivals Cortland in his first match at the helm, Williams led the Bombers to a victory in five sets and wound up going 31-5 that season. The next year in 2016, that success followed him to Colgate — the Raiders went 18-11 and narrowly missed out on winning the Patriot League tournament. Though it was just his second season coaching and first at Colgate, Williams had already tasted success.

Williams lived for game days and practices, and as a result his work behind the scenes, what Syracuse head coach Leonid Yelin said is 70% of college coaching, suffered. Making it to Division I in just his second year as a coach made him feel like he was “hot stuff,” he said. But then Colgate head coach Ryan Baker sat him down and had what Williams said now is the most important conversation he’s had in his life.

“You have to outwork everybody in this industry because you don’t have the resume,” Baker recalled saying. “Everyone’s looking for the last bigtime national team men’s player. And you don’t have it.”

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Three years later, in his second season at Syracuse, Williams has risen to become Yelin’s top assistant following associate head coach Erin Little’s departure to Cortland this past summer. During much of his time at Ithaca, it didn’t seem like Williams would pursue a coaching career at all — he’d covered six U.S. Opens and several U.S. rugby qualifiers in London as a television and radio major. Now, though, having just completed his fifth season, players and coaches who know Williams said he’s ready to become a D-I head coach.

“I think that grind has set me up for success in terms of it’s an expectation that I’m busy all the time now,” Williams said. “At the end of the day, I knew that everything I had to do was so I could pursue the dream of coaching.”

But in order to improve players on the court, Williams had to become a better one himself. He was a lifelong tennis player, even playing two seasons for Ithaca’s team, and said the serving technique helped him quickly master volleyball’s hitting techniques. Williams could perform a one-foot takeoff slide, despite his lack of technical volleyball training.

During his senior year of college, he was a student assistant for the club team, and Donovan offered him an assistant job following his graduation. After he filled in as interim head coach, Williams knew coaching was the right path. It was the first time he’d experience what he said is the best feeling in coaching: seeing excitement on a player’s face after spending countless hours in the gym working on a detail of his/her game.

After the 2015-16 season with Ithaca, Williams called Baker — an Ithaca graduate who Williams had briefly worked with before at Baker’s camp. It had only been one season, but Williams was already serious about getting into coaching.

Knowing how limited the opportunities are in college coaching, Baker added him to the staff ahead of the 2016-17 season as an assistant coach. Baker and his wife Kristin, the then-assistant coach at Colgate, even welcomed Williams into their home.

“They took me and I slept in their living room for four months with a one-year-old running around,” Williams said. “So I didn’t sleep much, but they’re great family.”

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Over time, Williams slowly learned the intricacies of what it takes to run a Division I program: the travel planning, the scouting, the recruiting. After the 2016-17 season, Kristin landed the head coaching job at Hamilton College and took Williams with her as an assistant. Williams, still wanting to coach in Division I, stayed on with Colgate as a volunteer assistant for the next season as well.

It was then that Baker saw Williams lose the ego he came in with and become the “grinder” he is now. Williams was the proverbial first guy in, last guy out at Colgate before going to work evening shifts until 2 a.m. at one of his two bartending jobs in Hamilton.

Having four jobs at the time, combined with constant commutes between Colgate and Hamilton led to a lot of “crappy days and nights,” Williams said, Still, he remembered the stern conversation with Baker. He’s not the bigtime volleyball player many programs look for, so he’ll always have to outwork his competition.

“Derryk is motivated by not disappointing his peers, his athletes,” Baker said. “So Derryk will not sleep to make sure that everyone feels like he’s doing his job at the best level he can.”

In the spring of 2018, Baker needed to hire another assistant coach and he called Yelin, asking about one of his assistants. But Yelin needed a new assistant too. Baker knew Syracuse would be the perfect opportunity for Williams, and Yelin said it was Baker “putting his reputation on the table” that swayed his decision the most.

On Syracuse match days, it’s hard to miss Williams, who is often the first coach to bolt from his seat and relay potential plays to look for. He’ll point out service return destinations and opposing hitters’ tendencies. Senior libero Aliah Bowllan said working with Williams one-on-one in practice eased her transition into the starting lineup for the first time in 2018.

After Little left for Cortland, Yelin, who largely handles international recruiting, put Williams in charge of it domestically. He texted Baker, as he does every week, and said, “Uh, I think I’m going to be in charge of scouting, what do you do?”

“Start calling people,” Baker replied, “And keep asking questions.”

From there, Williams took the lead role in recruiting Naomi Franco — the only officially announced member of SU’s 2020 recruiting class so far — along with others he couldn’t disclose. Looking back, both Yelin and Baker said they would’ve been better prepared to be head coaches if they’d had Williams’ experiences.

Under Yelin, who’s been coaching for 50 years and called Syracuse the “final destination” of his career, Williams has learned how to mold “raw” players into technicians, Baker said. At Colgate and Hamilton, Williams learned what it takes to be a Division I head coach. At Syracuse, he’s inched that much closer to his goal of taking over a Division I program.

“For me to leave right now, it would be have to be a dream job, which I don’t really have a dream job right now,” Williams said. “This is my dream job right now.”