Before Micheal Williams roamed the sidelines as a football coach, he was walking hospital halls as a certified nursing assistant shortly after his 2002 graduation from Pine Bluff High School.
"My mom is a nurse, so she's been working all her life as a nurse," he said. "So, I said, you know what, let me see if I can do this nursing thing."
Williams actually pursued a career as a doctor before deciding he didn't want to stay in graduate school a long time. So, he went into the corporate world and was a chemist for Dallas-area businesses Frito-Lay and Mary Kay.
"Something hit me," he recalled. "I'm enjoying the money, but I'm not enjoying the job. And from there, I said, you know what, I'm going to get back to what I do, and that's football."
Fruitful has been Williams' calling to share the game with the next generation. Over 13 years, he's been an assistant coach at three high schools in the Dallas area -- an interim head coach at one of them -- and now, he's the Pine Bluff School District's hope for returning a 23-time state championship program back to prominence.
Not to mention help the Zebras post their first winning season in five years. They went 2-7 last year, winning both the season opener over Watson Chapel and finale over Sheridan.
"When you move from the old and you're going to the new, one thing we all agreed on, is that we're not looking back," said Cheryl Hatley, who stepped down as PBSD athletic director last month but is still the district's director of student support services. "We don't want our kids looking back. We don't want our parents looking back. We're all going one direction, and that's forward.
"Do we believe that everything is going to go 120% like we want it to? Probably not. But do I believe Micheal 'Peanut' Williams will give 110% every day? That I know."
Williams said he earned the nickname from Hatley when she supervised him at Southeast Middle School, the now-closed seventh-grade campus.
"I was something else," Williams said.
In high school, Williams was a running back younger players could look up to, Go Forward Pine Bluff CEO Ryan Watley said. Watley was a sophomore during Williams' senior season of 2001, just after the two played on Pine Bluff's state runner-up baseball team.
"He knows about the history and the culture of Pine Bluff High School and sports," Watley said. "He believes what the stripes stand for, and he's about that, 100%. I was a sophomore and he was a senior. He strapped it on every day and went to work. That's evident by his profile, the Zebra memorabilia and photos and stats of when he played. I envision that brand being re-established."
Williams was a receivers coach and recruiting coordinator at Duncanville, Texas from the time the Panthers won just two games in 2015 through the time they were on the cusp of an undefeated state championship season in 2018. In one of the greatest high school games ever, Duncanville took a 36-35 lead with 1:02 remaining in the 6A Division I final -- the highest level of Texas public-school football -- a lead Houston-area North Shore erased with a successful Hail Mary touchdown pass as time expired.
Williams' experience with Duncanville gives him hope he can orchestrate a similar resurgence in Pine Bluff.
"We've got the same exact kids in Pine Bluff as in Duncanville," he told well-wishers during his public introduction as head coach Wednesday. "It's going to be a fun season."
Yet, a 14-1 season four years ago doesn't even top the list of most successful years Williams had in coaching.
"My fourth year, I was at [Dallas'] W.T. White High School," he said. "We were talented, but we didn't have any linemen. We were in the top district in the state of Texas. It was my best year because everybody showed up to practice, 100%. It's hard to get the kids to come to practice, and you're 0-10. They all showed up to practice 100% of the time. They all worked hard 100% of the time, and I had 15 kids sign college scholarships on an 0-10 team."
Watley envisions his former teammate reinstating a culture of next-level athleticism at their alma mater.
"I see him correcting the attention to something that has not been viewed as necessary, and that's the recruitment of players to [NCAA Division I] schools," said Watley, a former University of Arkansas at Pine Bluff receiver. "That's based on his record. I and other alums want to do all we can to break the cycle of players not being eligible and use their talents to get to a higher institution.
"I look forward to his energy, and I hope the community will come out and listen to one of its native sons and listen to what he needs to make the program successful."