NC State Men’s Basketball released their 5th episode of Around Raleigh With Coach Wade today. Coach Wade sat down with Forward Darrion Williams, who transferred to NC State this offseason from Texas Tech. You can read the transcript below, and watch the video underneath.
WW: Welcome to our next episode of Around Raleigh, here with Darrion Williams. We are at the famous Players Retreat, one of my favorite lunch spots in Raleigh. Been here a bunch of times already. We come here on unofficial visits, official visits. It’s a favorite of our staff, a favorite of the recruits, and of our players as well.
So we brought D5 here when he was on his visit. So very, very excited to be coming to you from Players Retreat, and excited for everybody to get to know a little bit about Darrion.
Grew up in Sacramento, Northern California. Got a little bit of that California in you still.
Talk about growing up in California, and then the transfer to high school to Bishop Gorman in Las Vegas. Talk about growing up in Sacramento, and then the move from Sacramento to Bishop Gorman in Vegas.
DW: Yeah, so I grew up with a pretty big family. I’ve got seven siblings. Trying to find a way to get college paid for. In Northern California, it’s hard to do that unless you already have a name coming up, and I wasn’t one of those people.
So I ended up moving to Vegas, going to Bishop Gorman. Coach Rice got me there, and then I knew Will McClendon, because he’s from Sacramento too, so he had moved out there. So he kind of told me if I’m gonna move to Vegas, I should come to Gorman.
So going out there, and then Junior year was COVID, so I didn’t even have a Junior year really. Senior year, I just took advantage of the opportunity and got me to Nevada.
WW: Talk a little bit about that recruitment process, going to Nevada, and then being the rookie of the year in the Mountain West, which propelled you to Texas Tech.
DW: I didn’t have an offer until Tarkanian my Senior year, which is right around Christmas. My first offer was Long Beach, and then Weber and Montana came, a lot of the Big Sky, Big West came calling. Nevada ended up coming late, and I just liked the opportunity for me, looking at the team. That was only two hours from Sac, so I was like, ‘Okay, I’ll go closer to home.’
Once we got there, honestly, I thought I was going to have a bad year, because my first scrimmage, I had one point, one rebound and like four or five turnovers. I was like, ‘It’s going to be a rough year.’ Played like 10 minutes, so yeah, ‘It’s going to be bad.’
But as the season was going on, I just tried to find a way to get on the court, and that year, I think it was just rebounding. That’s how, because we weren’t a very good rebounding team, so I told coach, ‘Whatever you need me to do to play, I’ll do it.’ And he said, ‘Just go in there, get as many rebounds as you can,’ and that’s what I tried to do.
Then I was able to have a pretty good year, got Freshman of the Year, and then after that, took my talents to Tech.
WW: For your career, you’ve averaged over seven rebounds a game, so that’s something that was certainly instilled in you at Nevada to get on the court, and then you’ve been able to translate that from Nevada to Tech, and hopefully to NC State. We’ll see.
DW: I mean, just trying to impact the game as many ways as possible. You’re not going to score 20 every day. You’re not going to have 15 assists every game. But I feel like a lot of people don’t like to rebound, or don’t know the importance of getting a rebound, whether that’s late in the game, or going to get an offense rebound, or not allowing the other team to get an offense rebound, is big throughout the game. So we’re trying to impact the game, and yeah, I plan on doing that here too.
WW: You had some huge games this past year for Tech in the NCAA tournament. Tremendous game against Florida in the Elite Eight, and so talk about what kind of clicked, or what changed where you turned into a different player, which is great. You played your best in the biggest moments when Tech needed you most. Talk about that a little.
DW: I think just growing up, you always wanted to play in the NCAA tournament, and I was able to go all three of my years, but obviously last year was the deepest run we went on, and I think I was just determined to make a run, and I like playing in the bigger games. Those are the most fun to me when the lights are bright, and you get to play against some of the other top guys in the country, talk a little mess, and just makes everything more interesting and more fun to play in.
WW: You put your name into the draft process and went through the NBA draft process, so talk us through that. It’s a tremendous experience. Before you went to the draft process, you went on a trip overseas, which was cool. Always good to go overseas. Talk about your trip overseas, but then get into the pre-draft process. It’s something that when you were playing AAU for your dad, or barely getting on the court in the scrimmage at Nevada, you probably never dreamed you’d be in the NBA Combine and go through that process. Talk about the trip, then leading into the draft process, how all that went and what all that meant to you.
DW: The trip was, I went with Feddy (Federiko Federiko) and our other teammate, Eemeli Yalaho, who’s at Washington State now. They’re both from Finland, so I wanted to see where they were from, because we all had gotten really close throughout this past year. We lived together, so I wanted to go out there. I wanted to see Eemeli’s family again, because I had flown them out from Finland to the U.S. during the year, and I told her I would come out and see Finland, so I went to go see where both they’re from.
Feddy’s from Helsinki, Eemeli’s from Jyväskylä. Hope I said that right. We went there, just kind of looked around the city a little bit.
It’s really different, but it’s cool, though. It’s cool out there. That was my first time going overseas.
Came back, got in the draft process. My first workout was with the Kings, and it was just a surreal moment, because being from Sac, I never really thought I’d be in the Combine or doing the whole process in general, and one of the reporters asked me that, and I couldn’t put into words how much it meant to me. The first one, being at home. If you had asked me a year ago, two years ago, when I was in Nevada, would I be here? I probably would have said no, because I’m a realistic type of person, but that was cool.
Then I did Milwaukee, and I did Brooklyn. After that was the Combine. The Combine was a great experience. You get to meet some teams. You get to do that whole process for that week, and after that, just sat down with my family and my agents and decided it probably was best to come back to college for one more year, and hopped on phone calls with you, and here we are.
WW: We’re very excited to have Darrion. He’s going to have a great season for us. I think he’s somebody that’s going to be on the Preseason All-American list. He’s somebody that can be the ACC Player of the Year. He’s somebody that’s got a lot of versatility that our fans are going to love watching. As you can tell, he’s fun to be around. He’s a great person, great kid, and great young man.
Very, very excited to have him running with the Pack, and can’t wait for everybody to see him on the court at Lenovo this season.
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