MAUMELLE — Shawn Williams returned to Maumelle to complete some unfinished business.
And while the Hornets came oh so close to winning the Class 5A state title, falling to Forrest City in the championship game, 91-85 in overtime, Williams declared his senior season to be a success.
“It was disappointing to lose, but I had a good season,” said Williams, who is headed to East Carolina University in Greenville, North Carolina next year. “I just looked at the more positive sides to everything. I’m glad I got to showcase with the people I was close to.
“I still wish I’d have got the ring, though.”
Williams, the River Valley & Ozark Edition Boys Player of the Year for 2016, got almost everything else.
The 6-2 point guard scored a career-high 44 points in the championship game at Hot Springs’ Bank of the Ozarks Arena (second only to Antario Glover of Stephens, who scored 47 in 2000). Williams hit 8 of 20 from the 3-point range — state-finals records for both attempts — and made, and finished, 15 of 33 from the floor, with seven rebounds and two assists.
For the season, he averaged 23 points, 3.3 rebounds, 3.6 assists and 1.7 steals per game for the Hornets, who finished 25-5, including a forfeit after a makeup game that had conflicted with the funeral of the school’s athletic director couldn’t be rescheduled.
Maumelle coach Michael Shook moved Williams up to the varsity squad after the first semester of his freshman year. He scored 16 points in his debut.
“He ended up being our best varsity player as a ninth-grader,” Shook said. “We won the conference and [Class 4A] regional and lost in the state quarterfinals.”
Williams left as a sophomore to play for a Dallas prep school and as a junior to play for Southwest Christian Academy in Little Rock. Last year, the Hornets won the 5A-West and finished state runner-up to Little Rock McClellan.
“We were at the state finals, and he came to watch and told me, ‘Coach, I’m coming back my senior year to finish what we started my freshman year,’” Shook said. “I knew all along he was wanting to finish what he’d started.
“It turned out that this was a year where there was a lot of growth for the players, as well as me as a coach.”
But it wasn’t as easy as the record indicates — even after a fast start.
The Hornets lost just one game during the fall semester. They started the season playing a fast tempo and pressing style, and scored 99 points three times in their first
five games.
“We were going to outscore you and run you to death, and we had some depth and weren’t real big,” Shook said. “We felt that gave us the best chance to win.”
But as the season went on, he said, the climate of the team changed.
“It felt like the guys weren’t happy, even though we were winning,” Shook said. “Especially by Christmastime, they didn’t seem to enjoy playing together. It was almost like they were going through the motions.”
His assistants, he said, noticed some things on the floor once the Hornets started 5A-West conference play.
“At first, I laughed it off, but then when I went back and looked at the film, I saw it,” Shook said. “I think the reason we were having problems was a few guys on the team had some issues with Shawn, and they wouldn’t even pass him the ball. There were some conversations about, ‘This is my team,’ ‘No, this is my team,’ and their retaliation was, ‘We won’t throw him the ball in the game.’ But he was still scoring. He was our leading scorer
all year.”
Williams agreed that some selfishness hurt the team.
“We all wanted to do the same thing,” he said. “I was still friends with everybody on the team, but me and Tremont [Robinson, a junior guard], talked and said, ‘If we want to try to win state, we’ve got to be the 1-2 punch.”
Shook said in January that he was telling his assistants, “Even though we’re 15-1, 16-1, I can’t wait for this year to be over. I don’t even like being around them.”
After a pair of back-to-back conference losses to Morrilton and Little Rock Christian in January, Shook said the team had “kind of a come-to-Jesus meeting.”
“We made some adjustments and this and that, and then about a week or so later, there was an incident at school that led to me dismissing two guys from the team, and it happened to be those,” he said. “A third one had nothing to do with the trouble, but I let him go that same week for other issues.”
Two of the three were
starters.
“I tried to stress to the team, ‘We’re going to be fine; next man up; let’s not give up now,’ trying to keep up the positives,” Shook said. “It really worked. The climate changed completely.”
Practices improved overnight, he said, and Harrison visited for the next game.
“I had several fans come up after we won, saying it looked like the kids were having fun,” he said. “It was great just to see that they enjoyed being together. The culture and the climate changed.”
He said he had individual meetings with Williams and Robinson, who led the team in every statistic but scoring, where he was second to Williams.
“I told those guys, ‘We’re going as far as you two carry us. We’ve got role players around you, but it’s all on you two,’” Shook said. “They were excited — ‘Yes sir, we’re ready; we’re going to show you’ — and both of them did. They stepped up their all-around game, as well as their scoring.”
Another meeting with the whole team focused on filling various roles.
“Things got fun again,” Shook said. “I’ve always been a full-court-press coach, but I knew we had to have Shawn and Tremont on the floor the whole game. We had to slow down and become more of a half-court team. I’ve always been a big-time motion guy — everybody gets to shoot the ball. I had to change that, too. We needed those two to take the majority of the shots and the others feed off that and take advantage of their opportunities.
“The team grew, as well, because they had to, in the middle of the season, adjust to our philosophy change. They did a real good job adapting to that.”
Williams agreed.
“[Before, everybody] felt like they had to score, but when that happened, we ended up having fun and passing more,” he said.
The Hornets clinched their fourth consecutive conference title with a win at Harrison to earn the league’s top seed for the state tournament. There they beat Jacksonville, 81-73; Magnolia, 63-55; and Little Rock Mills, 63-59, to reach the final.
Against Forrest City, Williams outscored the Mustangs to start the second half, 16-5, to put Maumelle up by 59-46 with 4:02 left in the third quarter. The Hornets led by 67-59 heading into the fourth.
But midway through the period, as the Mustangs were cutting into the deficit, Robinson tore his left meniscus and suffered a partial tear of his ACL. He left with 15 points and nine rebounds; his absence the rest of the way allowed Forrest City to double-team Williams and helped the Mustangs take the lead. Williams did, however, hit a long 3 with about 30 seconds left in regulation to tie the game at 82. The Mustangs then prevailed in overtime.
Williams said that before the game, he told himself he was going to score 50 points and get a ring.
“I already knew I was going to play real good, so that wasn’t surprising to me,” he said. “I went into that game with a chip on my shoulder. Everybody was talking about [Bentonville star] Malik Monk, [who signed with Kentucky]. Not to hate on him, but I wanted them to talk about me. I’m doing the same thing.”
Shook said the back-to-back state final losses were hard to take.
“Any time you lose, it’s not good, and it hurts, but last year it was so exciting to be there,” Shook said. “Everybody was in awe, and we were shell-shocked. Our best player broke his collarbone in the second round; we weren’t supposed to make the final.
“This year, we felt like we put in the work; we earned it. We deserved to be there and expected to be there. We should’ve won. But when Tremont went down, that changed everything.
“If we could just get over this injury bug, we could probably win the state
championship.”
Williams said he thought his leadership skills improved over the topsy-turvy season.
“Me being a D-1 signee, everybody was looking up to me,” he said. “I just had to step it up once the other players were gone.”
Williams signed with East Carolina in November. He said he was attracted to the coaching staff and the American Athletic Conference, which also includes Memphis, UConn and SMU.
“With [ECU] not being a big powerhouse, they’re expecting me to come in and kill it,” he said.
Williams said that after basketball, he’d like to eventually wind up in coaching.
He’s had a good mentor.
“It was only right to finish my high school career with Coach Shook,” Williams said.