Road to Duke
Weldon Williams came up out of Park Forest, Illinois - the south-suburban Cook County village along the Lincoln Highway that was, in the late 1970s and early 1980s, one of the most ethnically integrated communities in the Chicago region, home to families whose kids grew up in racially mixed public schools that the Chicago Tribune at the time held up as examples of how American suburbs could work. He was 6'6", a forward, and one of the higher-ceilinged high-school basketball prospects in the Chicago Heights area in the early 1980s. Mike Krzyzewski's Duke staff signed him in the spring of 1982. He was, in the language Coach K himself would later use on his own official website to describe the recruiting class that arrived in Durham that October, a member of the 1982 class made up of Johnny Dawkins, Mark Alarie, David Henderson, Jay Bilas, and Weldon Williams.
The five-name list is, in the words Coach K's coachk.com site uses to describe its impact, the recruiting class that was rated one of the nation's best and put Duke on the map to stay. It is the recruiting class on which the entire modern Duke basketball program was founded. Four of those five names became permanent fixtures of Duke basketball history. Johnny Dawkins was the 1986 Naismith National Player of the Year, the 1986 ACC Player of the Year, and the 10th overall pick of the 1986 NBA Draft. Mark Alarie was the 18th overall pick of the 1986 NBA Draft. David Henderson played four years in the NBA. Jay Bilas became the most-recognized college basketball analyst at ESPN. Weldon Williams - the fifth name on the list, the 6'6" Park Forest, Illinois forward - became the four-year role player on the Duke roster whose path after Cameron Indoor Stadium would lead, twenty years later, to the pulpit of Triumph Community Church in Bolingbrook, Illinois. The Brotherhood that began in 1982 did not produce four legends and a footnote. It produced four legends and a pastor.
At Duke
Weldon Williams's freshman year, 1982-83, was Coach K's third year at Duke. The team went 11-17 and finished last in the ACC. It was Coach K's bottom. Weldon Williams played in thirteen of the team's twenty-eight games, totaled forty minutes across them, attempted fourteen shots from the field, and made ten of them - a 71.4 percent shooting line as a freshman role player that hinted at what kind of efficient finisher the 6'6" Park Forest forward could be when he found his minutes. The team would, the next year as the Godfather Class moved into its sophomore season, win 24 games and earn the program's first NCAA Tournament bid under Coach K. The Duke program was about to begin its modern climb. Weldon Williams was about to begin a quiet four-year role-player career in the middle of it.
His sophomore year, 1983-84, was the breakthrough Duke season - 24-10, the first NCAA Tournament under Coach K, a first-round loss to Washington that nonetheless signaled the arrival of the program. Weldon Williams played in two games that year. He totaled two minutes. He attempted one shot from the floor and did not make it. The Dawkins-Alarie-Henderson-Bilas sophomore class was now eating most of the available wing minutes. Weldon Williams kept his place on the roster. He stayed in the building. He went back to the gym in the summer. He came back for his junior year.
His junior year, 1984-85, brought him back into the rotation. He played in twenty-seven of the team's thirty-one games, averaged 5.1 minutes per appearance, shot 58.3 percent from the floor for the season, and scored 47 total points. The 1984-85 Duke team went 23-8, reached the Sweet Sixteen, and finished the season ranked top-ten nationally. The Godfather Class was now juniors. Tommy Amaker was a freshman starter at point guard. Weldon Williams was the senior class's quiet backup - the senior to be - whose 6'6" frame and 58.3 percent shooting clip made him a valuable end-of-rotation forward who could finish around the basket on the rare occasions he got to.
His senior year, 1985-86, was the Duke season that defined the foundation era. 37-3, the most wins in NCAA Division I history at the time, a 21-game winning streak, undefeated at home, the Big Apple NIT title, the ACC regular-season title, the ACC Tournament title, the NCAA East Region title, and the 1986 National Championship Game at Reunion Arena in Dallas, lost 72-69 to Denny Crum's Louisville Cardinals. Weldon Williams was a senior reserve on that team. He played in thirty-one of the team's forty games. He averaged 6.1 minutes per appearance. He scored 54 total points on 45.7 percent shooting. He was on the floor for the program's first ACC Tournament title under Coach K. He was on the floor for the East Region win that sent the team to Dallas. He was on the bench for the 72-69 Louisville loss in the title game. He walked off the floor of Reunion Arena in Dallas a Duke senior who had played four years in Coach K's program, scored 126 career points, finished as a member of the foundational Duke team of the entire Coach K era, and earned his Bachelor of Science in Biomedical Engineering from the Pratt School of Engineering. He was, by the framing of his own career path, ready for what came next.
After Duke
Weldon Williams chose, after Duke, a path none of his four 1982 classmates had chosen. The Godfather Class's other four members went to the NBA - Dawkins to San Antonio with the 10th overall pick, Alarie to Denver with the 18th overall pick, Henderson to Washington in the second round - or, in Jay Bilas's case, to a four-year overseas career followed by Duke Law School and the broadcast booth at ESPN. Weldon Williams did not pursue a basketball career. He chose, instead, the seminary.
He earned his Master of Divinity from Westminster Theological Seminary - the Reformed seminary, founded in 1929 in suburban Philadelphia, that has trained generations of Presbyterian Church in America ministers. The path between the Pratt School engineering classroom in Durham and the Westminster lecture hall in Glenside, Pennsylvania, is not a path many Duke basketball alumni take. Weldon Williams took it. By the year 2000, he was ordained and ready to plant a church. Triumph Community Church, the Presbyterian congregation in Bolingbrook, Illinois - the Will County town in the Chicago southwest suburbs - was founded in 2001 with Weldon Williams Jr. as its senior pastor. He would pastor Triumph Community Church for the next nineteen years, from 2000 through 2019. He preached every Sunday at 341 Remington Boulevard. He led the congregation through the entirety of the 2000s and the 2010s. He was, in the words of the corporate registry of Illinois religious leaders, the senior Religious Leader of Triumph Community Church.
In June 2011, when his Duke teammate Tom Emma - the senior point guard from Brooklyn who had played at Duke from 1979 through 1983 and had been Weldon Williams's senior backcourt teammate during his freshman year - died at age forty-nine, Weldon Williams was asked by Duke Basketball Report to share a remembrance. His response was the kind of pastoral language that is, by then, the language he had been preaching in for more than a decade at Triumph Community Church. He called Tom Emma a good man. He noted that Emma had made the transition from childhood to manhood easier for him as a freshman. He said he was heartbroken. The Brotherhood, in Weldon Williams's framing of it, was the senior teammate who had made the freshman feel welcome twenty-five years before the seminary years and twenty-eight years before the obituary.
In June 2019, after nineteen years in the pulpit, Weldon Williams preached his final Sunday sermon at Triumph Community Church. The Triumph Facebook page posted a video of the service titled "Pastor Weldon Williams Moving On." He transitioned, in his sixth decade of life, into corporate work - by 2020, the official Wheaton Academy Board of Trustees bio listed him as Senior Director for Quality Assurance at HAVI, the Rosemont, Illinois-headquartered global supply chain company that handles much of the McDonald's Corporation's worldwide ingredient and packaging supply chain. The Duke biomedical engineering degree from 1986 was, three and a half decades later, finally being deployed in a corporate enterprise quality-assurance role of substantial scale. The pastor of nineteen years had become the engineering executive.
Where Is He Now
Weldon Williams sits today on the Board of Trustees of Wheaton Academy, the Christian classical college-preparatory school in West Chicago, Illinois that was founded in 1853 by abolitionists who wanted to start a school that would train their kids to fight the evils of society. He is the parent of an alumnus, Evan Williams of the Wheaton Academy Class of 2015. In June 2020, in the months after George Floyd's murder in Minneapolis, the Wheaton Academy communications office asked Weldon Williams and Wheaton Academy Spanish teacher Christian Rivera to participate in a published interview titled Voices on Race and Justice. The interview is, by the standards of public statements made by Duke basketball alumni, one of the most thoughtful and theologically substantial Brotherhood interviews in the open record.
Williams told the Wheaton Academy interviewers about his sons' years in the local public school district - the years of teacher conferences over what the family experienced as disparaging treatment of his children. He told the story of his middle son being told he lacked the leadership to be in the National Honor Society despite being captain of the basketball team and the founder of the Poets Society. He framed his family's choice of Wheaton Academy for the youngest son as the alternative they had concluded they needed. He recounted, with the cadence of a pastor telling a parable to a Sunday morning congregation, the moment his youngest son told him after two months at Wheaton Academy that at his old school none of the teachers had liked him, that at Wheaton Academy all of the teachers liked him, that he could not figure it out. The pastor who had spent nineteen years at Triumph Community Church teaching his congregation about the Kingdom of God on earth was now, as a parent, watching his son discover the Kingdom in a private Christian high school classroom in West Chicago.
The interview moved on to the Wheaton Academy mission. Williams told the interviewers that the Kingdom Community vision had slowly made advances toward being realized, that the faculty's love for Christ and others was exemplified in how they each poured their lives into all children regardless of color, but that the challenge was to understand how the prevailing norms of society may themselves perpetuate systemic bias and disenfranchisement. The greatest challenge of a people, in his framing, was to recognize that they had blind spots and to seek to uncover them. He called on Wheaton Academy to decry the subtle brokenness of society that disenfranchises a people group and violates their inalienable rights. He prayed, in print at the end of the interview, that the Academy would become a safe place for all who seek to find solace in the shadow of our Savior.
The Brotherhood, as Weldon Williams has lived it, is the version of the Brotherhood that the other four members of the 1982 Godfather Class did not produce. Johnny Dawkins produced the Naismith Trophy and the NBA career and the Duke assistant coaching years. Mark Alarie produced the eight-year NBA career and the financial-services post-basketball. David Henderson produced the NBA years and the high school coaching career. Jay Bilas produced the ESPN broadcast booth and the Duke Law degree. Weldon Williams produced the biomedical engineering BSE and the Westminster M.Div. and nineteen years of Sunday-morning preaching at Triumph Community Church in Bolingbrook, Illinois, and the Senior Director role at HAVI, and the Board of Trustees seat at Wheaton Academy, and the public 2020 interview about race and the Kingdom that quoted his pastor's framing for a national audience. The Brotherhood that began with five names in the 1982 recruiting class produced four basketball legends and one pastor. The pastor is part of the Brotherhood. The Brotherhood is part of the pastor. The fifth name on the 1982 class list became the man whose pulpit faithful would have heard the sermons in which the lessons of Cameron Indoor Stadium - the lessons of obligation, of preparation, of brotherhood with teammates - were translated into the language of the Reformed faith and the Christian Kingdom Community vision. Coach K's official website lists his five recruits. The Brotherhood website includes the fifth one.