COLORADO SPRINGS, Colo.— It hasn’t taken long for Zion Williamson to become a YouTube and Twitter sensation.
The muscular 6-7, 230-pound power forward from small, academically challenging Spartanburg, S.C. Day School, a private PK through 12 private school that built a reputation for sending 100 percent of its graduates to college, has already attracted millions of viewers, who can’t get enough of his thunderous, mind blowing slam dunks, to various mixtapes that appear to YouTube.
Forget the fact Williamson averaged 36.8 points and 13.8 rebounds as a junior and led his team to a second straight South Carolina 2A state championship. At the age of 17, Williamson is the newest human highlight film, a freak of nature who is arguably the best dunker in the history of high school basketball. More devastating than LeBron James. More spectacular than Vince Carter.
He officially became a legend last February as soon as ESPN played a clip of him throwing down a 360-degree windmill slam dunk in a game and declared it the No. 1 Play on SportsCenter’s Top 10, igniting a debate about whether Williamson or RJ Barrett of Montverde, Fla. Academy, the star of Canada’s gold medal winning team in the U19 World Championships last summer in Cairo, is the best prospect in the class of 2018. Williamson, a good student, has received offers from blue bloods like Kansas, Kentucky, Duke and North Carolina, who all sent their head coaches on a pilgrimage to watch him work out in his high school gym. Roy Williams of North Carolina called him the best he’d seen since Michael Jordan and Mike Krzyzewski, who coached the U.S. Senior men’s team to three Olympic gold medals, said if Williamson signed with Duke, he would use him the same way he used LeBron James.
Williamson has already appeared on the covers of Sports Illustrated and Slam Magazine, attracted the attention of ABC’s “Good Morning America,’’ received a Twitter shout out from Steph Curry and developed a friendship with Canadian rapper Drake. ESPN is so anxious to showcase his unusual talents, the cable giant has already scheduled Spartanburg Day for two nationally televised games this season.
Williamson, who was at the Olympic training center this weekend to try out for the U.S. team that will play a group of international stars at the annual Nike Hoop Summit, may not have a reality show like LaMelo Ball and his brothers. But he has built a similar cult following to LeBron, who became the biggest celebrity in modern high school basketball when he was a senior for at St. Vincent’s- St. Mary’s in Akron back in 2002.
“Just last summer,’’ he said, “I was walking down the street in Vegas and I was on Facetime. And this dude said to me, “Zion, I’ve been following you for two blocks. I wanted to wait until you hung up the phone before asked you for a picture.
“I said, ‘Sir, you didn’t have to follow me for two blocks to ask me for a photo.’
“Of course, I posed for one with him.’’
Williamson has become the poster child for basketball in this state, surpassing even South Carolina’s men’s team, which made an unexpected trip to the 2017 NCAA Final Four. “South Carolina is a football state,’’ his mother Sharonda said. “But the fans have really embraced Zion.”
Williamson is in such demand, his step father Lee Anderson had to go on a local TV station in Spartanburg to deny a story that appeared on Chat Sports in which Jim Gatto, an Adidas executive who was arrested by the FBI in a wide-ranging corruption scandal for allegedly arranging to pay the family of a five-star recruit, Brian Bowden $100,000 to enroll at Louisville, was trying to use Adidas funds to convince Williamson to sign with another Adidas school, Kansas.
“Trust me, there is no truth to that,’’ Anderson said. “We had nothing to do with that. No one from Adidas has approached Zion, myself or my wife. We are 200 percent in the clear on this. If anyone approached the family without Zion’s best interests in mind we would simply walk away. We’re not going to do anything that would jeopardize his future.’’
Williamson visited Kansas last weekend and is scheduled to visit Kentucky and Duke in the next two weeks. He will set up his final two visits after that. He would like to consult with his family after that and make his decision by the end of November or the first week of December
Williamson, who was born in Salisbury, N.C., gets a lot of his competitive athletic instincts from his parents. His biological father Lateef Williamson was a 6-5 defensive tackle who signed to play football for NC State, then transferred to Division II Livingstone, S.C. College, where he met Zion’s mother Sharonda Sampson, who was a sprinter on the school’s track team. When she gave birth to her middle son, she decided to name him after Mt. Zion, one of the tallest mountains in Jerusalem, by Sharonda, who found the name while flipping through a Bible one night and thought it was a good fit.
The family moved from Salisbury, to Florence, S.C. when Zion was two years old. When Zion was five, his parents divorced.
Sampson, who now works as a middle-school Physical education teacher in Greensville, S.C. was Zion’s first real basketball coach throughout a series of youth leagues. “She was the hardest coach for me to play for,’’ Zion recalled. “Even if I made a shot, she’d probably yell at me, say, ‘There’s probably a better shot.’’’
Sampson eventually remarried and his new husband Lee, a point guard at Clemson and Columbus, Ga. State in college, had started coaching AAU teams. Because Williamson wasn’t very tall, Anderson started training him as a point guard. But that all changed when Williamson grew from a 5-9 string bean guard who was dwarfed by AAU teammates and couldn’t reach the rim until he was in ninth grader into a man child, sprouting up to 6-6 by 10th grade and overwhelming weaker defenders here, then putting on a spectacular display anytime he powers his way to the rim.
He got his first dunk in a game in ninth grade. “It was basic stuff,’’ he said.
Nothing Zion does is basic, anymore.
“My mentality is: ‘Killers kill’,’’ Williamson said. “Yeah, a lot of these kids are younger but hopefully in two years, I can be playing the NBA. LeBron’s not going to say, ‘You’re a rookie. I got to take it easy on you. So, you just got to play hard.’’
Most of the 2019 mock drafts have Williamson going in the Top 5 picks.
Williamson may be a beast on the court. But he has a gentle side to him, according to his mother. “He likes hanging out with the little kids,’’ she said. “His little brother, Noah, who is four, attends the same school and Zion will go over at lunch time and sit with him in the classroom.’’