Building Blocks

Williams has five siblings, ranging from his oldest sister, who turns 40 this year, to his younger brother, who is currently 18. His mom, a math teacher with a degree from Columbia, signed her kids up for just about everything; Williams played football, basketball, lacrosse, tennis and swimming throughout his childhood.

Plenty of football players spend their childhoods dreaming about playing in college or the NFL. For Williams, the focus was elsewhere: basketball.

“Pretty much basketball was my main sport my whole life,” Williams said. “From nine to 16, it was all basketball. I was on three different teams, training in the summers, all this stuff. My life was set around basketball.

“My whole life, everyone told me I should play football because I was always bigger,” Williams continued. “I was never a small kid. And I was always just like, ‘No, no, no, basketball, basketball.’”

Through his childhood years, Williams leaned heavily on his mom; he calls her Batman.

“She’s Batman, I’m Robin,” Williams said. “We’re the dynamic duo.”

As he attended Friends Academy in Locust Valley on the North Shore, Williams was living in Amityville while his mom worked in Freeport, both on the South Shore, which made for a triangle with at least a 45-minute drive between each point. His dad dropped him off at school in the mornings before heading to work, and his mom picked him up afterward.

“Literally, my mom is driving an extra hour and a half every day just to take me from school back home,” Williams said. “And that’s not even on the days I was playing on a basketball team out of the city. She would drive 45 minutes to come get me, then drive an hour up to Queens so I could go practice. Then from Queens, we would drive an hour back home. It was always just the two of us.”

When things get tough, especially on the field, the first person Williams calls is his dad.

“In my dad’s mind, I’m the best athlete to ever step foot in the world,” Williams said. “If I became a swimmer tomorrow, he would think I’m better than Michael Phelps. That’s just who he is.”

Heading into his junior year, Williams realized basketball was not going to be his path to playing in Division I, and he ultimately made his way back to football. But Friends Academy did not have a football team, so he transferred to Deerfield Academy, a boarding school in Massachusetts, where he played two seasons. Even while leaving home, he kept his family in mind.

“When it came to me picking boarding school, I didn’t want to go somewhere where I knew my family would never be able to go,” Williams said. 

Williams arrived at his first football camp raw; he was a good athlete, but he had never trained for the sport and hadn’t played in years. But after running a hand-timed 5.23-second 40-yard dash in front of Syracuse’s offensive line coach, the opportunities began to open for Williams.

“Right there, boom, I had my first offer [from Syracuse] at my first camp,” Williams said. “I hadn’t even done a football drill yet, I literally just ran.”

Offers from bigger football programs ultimately followed. But Williams, despite his incredible athleticism, credits that to the people around him.

“A big thing for me has always been surrounding myself with people who will help me succeed,” Williams said. “Just making sure I put myself in a position where I can have the opportunity. Then once you get it, the opportunity is up to you from there.”

Williams narrowed his options down to Vanderbilt, Wake Forest and Boston College. With a mom who teaches and a family that values academics, the decision was never only about football. But for Williams, one school stood out among the rest: Vanderbilt.

“Deep down, Vandy was always kind of my dream school,” Williams said. “I knew I wanted to do engineering. I wanted to maximize football for as long as I could, but I’m not going to be able to play football until I’m 60. So where could I go that would set me up for the best life after football?

“It was the best of both worlds,” Williams continued. “There’s no other conference you want to be in than the SEC. You get to play first-round picks every weekend, and if you’re able to compete and rise to the top, you’ll end up becoming one yourself. Then Monday through Friday, I’m in the classroom with some of the best as well.”

Vanderbilt was more to Williams than a school with the right mix of football and academics; it was a place where he could help build something, and a campus just 15 minutes from the airport meant his family could still be a part of it.

“I can say I was at Vanderbilt when nobody cared about the V logo, and we made the V into something,” Williams said. “That ability to build something and make that logo respected, that was a big draw for me.”

But building something can come with setbacks. And for Williams, that came in his first fall camp with the black and gold; he suffered a broken ankle that caused him to lose his freshman season in 2024. He was able to get back to practice during bowl prep, but he had a lot to catch up on after missing a year.

“You come in from high school and your head’s as big as it can be,” Williams said. “Your confidence and your ego are at an absolute high. You think you’re the man, you can’t do anything wrong. And then you play against college football players and it’s like, ‘Okay, I’ve got a lot to learn.’”

Fans’ attention largely goes to skill players, but the learning curve is often steeper along the offensive line where everyone will see a mistake.

“No one’s ever going to notice the great things you do as a lineman, but everyone’s always going to notice when you mess up,” Williams said. “If you miss a block, somebody is getting hit.”

Despite not being able to take the field, Williams stayed in the playbook and the film room, preparing for a chance that was months away. But looking back, he does not view the wait as lost time.

“If I was a true freshman playing, or even last year as a sophomore, I don’t think I would have been able to handle both sides of it,” Williams said. “Having two years to settle in academically and build the networks that can help me has put me in a position where I can handle it now. In a way, it was a blessing. God’s timing is perfect. Sometimes you don’t always get something when you want it, but there’s always a reason for that.”

This season, Williams’ first taste of action came against Delaware, where he played six snaps. According to him, those six snaps made him more nervous than the start that followed.

“I think I was more nervous the six snaps I played against Delaware than I was the entire game against Arkansas,” Williams said. “When you’re a second-stringer, you don’t really know when you’re going to go in. It’s a stay-ready thing, but how do you really just stay ready? When it came to Arkansas, I was confident in my ability, my intelligence, the size and the strength. You can have all the tools, but if you don’t believe in yourself to play at this level it’s never going to happen.”

And although football has become a focal point in his life, it is far from the only area that takes up his time. Williams is a mechanical engineering major, and he is currently in two lab sessions during the season. But where did engineering come from? Not from his family: his mom teaches math, and his older sister, who went to Harvard, majored in sociology. Williams is good with numbers, although he didn’t like them enough to commit his life to teaching them, and he never enjoyed writing papers.

“I’d rather do a hard engineering problem set any day of the week,” Williams said.

What initially drew him in was something much smaller.

“I like the idea of being able to look at something and say, ‘I built that,’” Williams said. “I’m a big Legos guy. I build a lot of Legos.”

He sees the same thing in a football team that he does in engineering; both ask a group of people to work toward one goal, and both leave with something greater than themselves.

“It’s kind of like a team sport in a way,” Williams said. “You collaborate with a bunch of different people. You work together towards the goal, and you complete the goal. It’s similar to a football team: you come together, you work towards the goal of winning, you finish a season, and at the end of the season you have something you’re proud of.”

Engineering has not always come easy to Williams; there are lectures where he writes down every word and still doesn’t know what they mean. There are problem sets that eat up hours of his time and leave him nowhere near finishing. But for Williams, those are the parts he enjoys.

“I’ll be doing a problem set and spend an hour on a problem and get halfway through it, at best, sometimes nowhere,” Williams said. “But that’s what I find fun and I love doing that. You can’t do it if you don’t love it; I love playing football, and I love being an engineer. If I didn’t love either, it wouldn’t be possible to do them at this level.”

Next semester, Williams will begin choosing electives that will help him narrow down what he wants to do with his degree. Part design has intrigued him the most, especially using computer-aided design (CAD) to create individual parts and put them together. As for what he wants to build, the list ranges anywhere from cars to spaceships.

“I’m thinking of doing something where I’m helping build cars, something along those lines,” Williams said. “Spaceships too. Whatever cool thing I can get myself into, I’ll probably do it.”

As for how he wants to be remembered at Vanderbilt, Williams again pointed to the people around him.

“I don’t play a position like quarterback where people are going to be walking around wearing my jersey,” Williams said with a laugh. “But the power we have as people is the effect we have on those around us; we may change others’ lives in small ways we might not realize. And because I’m at Vanderbilt, I also have to acknowledge that I’m one of those great people as well. There are plenty of people on campus who have helped me out and changed my perspective, and I try to do the same for them. I hope that if you ever got to talk to CJ Williams while he was on campus, it was a positive experience, a positive impact on your life and a positive opinion of what a Vanderbilt student-athlete is supposed to look like.”