Hollis Brookline's Alton Williams drives to the hoop during this past Monday's Division II semifinal win over Hanover in Rochester. (Photo by Dan Doyon)

HOLLIS – The way Alton Williams patrols the basketball court, you’d think he’s always been a basketball lifer.

Not so fast. The Hollis Brookline High School senior, who has helped the Cavaliers to an unbeaten regular season a spot in Sunday’s Division II championship game at the University of New Hampshire’s Lundholm Gym, might have been a standout on the soccer field instead.

That was Williams’ sport when he was a youth. What happened?

He figured height was potential might.

“In middle school, it hit me,” he said. “I’m going to be pretty tall, maybe should switch up to basketball.”

Of course, he had a few basketball coaches at soccer games come up to him, even at soccer games, and say it might be a good idea to try the sport. One of them happened to be current Cavs coach Ryan Kelley.

“They’d ask ‘Have you ever thought about basketball?'” Williams said. “I’d tell them ‘No, but I’ll give it a try.’

“Now look at us.”

Williams was six feet tall back in middle school, and now he’s an athletic 6-6, a rebounder, shot blocker, can move with the ball, and score 12 points or 30 – whatever the game calls for.

He was in the stands watching the Cavs play when he was younger, going to games with his cousins. But never once did he envision himself on the floor.

“Never,” he said. “It’s crazy to think about.”

And now those cousins and his extended family show up in droves at HB to see him play. Now opposing coaches, including Joe Morin, coach of Sunday’s final HB obstacle to a storybook season, No. 2 Pelham, have to think about how to stop him from taking over a game.

THE BEGINNING

Williams can remember his first time playing consistently, and it was youth travel ball at age nine or 10, and his first coach was none other than Kelley.

“I was getting used to it,” he said with a grin. “I was unorganized.”

But he enjoyed it and asked his Mom after that first season if he could do it again, and he got the green light. He started to feel comfortable in the game his eighth grade year in middle school, when his team lost in the Tri-County playoffs but was still successful. “I felt myself growing as a player,” he said. “But I was bummed. I told myself ‘I never want to feel like this again. I want to win.'”

He got a taste of the varsity game as a freshman, swinging between that and sub-varsity. Soccer was in the rearview mirror after his sophomore year and his time shifted to the hardwood where he started using his height to a great advantage, with his vertical leap improving, etc.

“The athleticism was always there,” Kelley said. “You could just see that targeted athleticism to his vertical, the work was put in and it definitely paid off.

“He’s always been able to get those offensive rebounds since he was a kid, and now it’s just bigger and better.”

With his love of defense, Williams fits Kelley’s system to a T.

“Defensively that helped me a lot, the ‘No Middle’,” he said of the philosophy of cutting off the middle for teams. “We do drills just moving our feet…That’s pretty much what helped me.”

Williams was focusing on rebounding first. But his favorite part is moving around on the floor. A lob, pass, and a win. All of it.

Oh, and of course dunking. He remembers the first time he did it, late in his freshman year at HB during an open gym. And it brought a roar.

“I just went up and threw it down,” he said. “The team was here. It felt great.”

“Missed dunks are now a surprise,” Kelley said. “A couple of years ago it was a surprise when it went in.”

Best part of his game?

“My hustle,” Williams said. “I’m going, not matter what happens, try to be there for my team, on offense, on defense. I’m going to try to be there.”

He tries to be as complete a player as possible, which is why he tries to emulate NBA star Giannis Antetokounmpo “I feel he’s a great all-around player, so I try to base myself around him,” he said.

Kelley’s feeling on the best part of Williams’ game? He is incredibly coachable.

“He’ll look you in the eyes, listen to everything you have to say, nod his head and say ‘Yes coach’,” Kelley said, “and then go out and try to do it.”

Williams athletic ability includes being able to move with the ball with speed. “He makes it look easy, because he breaks away from the defense so quickly,” Kelley said. “We like to work Alton from the outside in. He’s not really a post-up player even though he’s the tallest kid on the floor.”

He’s even gotten the green light he didn’t have last year to shoot 3’s; Kelley worked with him on his release and eventually he got up to 45 percent from the beyond the arc.

And he improved over the summer on his free throws, to the point when in fall ball he didn’t miss a foul shot his first three games. How? Going to the YMCA and “getting 100,000 shots up.”

Williams has tried to get the most he can out of basketball, so he enjoyed playing on the AAU/Club circuit and the traveling outside the region to cities like Baltimore, Philadelphia, New York, Connecticut, etc. “That brings a whole other level to it,” he said with a grin. “Cities and everything, it’s so cool – coming from a small town. It’s a different feeling.”

He’ll be in for an even different feeling next year, as he wants to embark on a collegiate career, playing the game he’s grown to love while studying business management. The question is where, and schools like Endicott, Nichols, Keene State, Curry, Plymouth State, Rivier, etc.

That’s the other new experience he had – being recruited.

“The first text or call I got from a coach (it was Rivier recruiting coordinator Bruce Marchand), that made my entire day,” he said. “I couldn’t stop smiling. I had a smile on my face or the rest of the day.”

HB’s Alton Williams tries to block a shot during a regular season game at Souhegan. (Telegraph file photo by TOM KING)

Kelley was afraid Williams might go prep after last season. But once open gyms started over the summer and Williams was showing up, he breathed a sigh of relief. “I was like, ‘Well then, I think we might have something.’,” Kelley said.

No, Williams loves the high school experience, and figured there was unfinished business. While he loved last year’s team, it was a tough ending at Sanborn in the quarters. Williams had 20 points at halftime, but the Cavs fell apart in the latter stages of the third and all of the fourth quarter.

“That feeling in the locker room, I hated it,” he said, noting it served as motivation for this year. “All of us, everyone that was returning, we said ‘We’re winning this thing.'”

One last hurdle, the Pythons.

“It would seal the deal,” he said. “Another memory to put in the memory book. It will make all the work you put in worth it, even more. We made it this far so it’s worth it now, but winning would make everything worth it worth it. … Winning just makes everything better.”