School: Upper Merion
Track & Field
Favorite athlete: Tyson Gay
Favorite team: Team USA
Favorite memory competing in sports: Making friends with other teams
Most embarrassing/funniest thing that has happened while competing in sports: Forgetting my spandex and having to run my race in short shorts.
Music on iPod: A lot of old school rap, and jazz
Future plans: Move to Africa and work on saving Western Silver Back Gorillas
Words to live by: “I can do all things through Christ who strengthens me.” Phillipians 4:13
One goal before turning 30: To visit the Island of Galapagos and experience Galapagos Marine Iguana feeding in their natural habitat
One thing people don’t know about me: I am really good with a yo-yo.
Mention the name Miles Williams to Joy Niemenski and Dave Symonds, and the Upper Merion track coaches search for the right words to describe a young man who seems to defy description.
“He’s phenomenal,” Niemenski said. “I wish I had a whole team of Miles. He is a great leader, extremely polite, hard working and dedicated. He’s just absolutely phenomenal.”
“He is a person of great character,” Symonds added. “He’s an extremely polite young man. He was a leader, and he had a very good work ethic. He set the tone in our workouts from day one.”
In the case of Miles Williams, words really might be too small to describe a student-athlete that is a breed apart from the rest.
Consider only an incident that was recounted to the two coaches at a league meeting.
“We had just gotten finished with the Trojan Track Classic, and Wissahickon’s coach came up to us and said, ‘Oh my goodness, you have a boy on your team…’” Niemenski said. “We just looked at them and said, ‘Miles.’”
Niemenski and Symonds had guessed right.
“After that meet was over, Miles went up to the press box and thanked Heidi Butt, the (Wissahickon) girls’ coach, for her efforts in running the meet and thanked her for the great meet they had put on,” Symonds said. “He thanked her for inviting him and Upper Merion.
“That kind of thing is unusual.”
Unless you’re Miles Williams. Then it’s pretty ordinary.
“We had a dual meet against PW towards the end of the season,” Symonds said. “The starter, who is one of the head PIAA officials, came up to me afterwards and said, ‘This never happens. These kids are so polite. The one kid thanked me for the meet and the officiating.’
“Miles will go up to the coaches from the other teams and thank them for the competition and tell them they have a nice team. We had a long season this year. The easiest thing to do is pack up and get out of town. He takes the time to go to the other coaches and the kids from the other teams and thank them for the completion.”
If that sounds like this kind of politeness couldn’t possibly be for real, guess again.
“You tell kids that it’s always nice to wish your competitors luck and congratulate them at the finish,” Niemenski said. “Some kids do it because ‘Okay, my coach told me I had to do it.’
“Miles does it, and he’s very genuine. I think people recognize that about him. He’s just a very polite genuine kid.”
Talk to Williams, and the Vikings’ senior captain insists there’s nothing especially unusual about showing good manners.
“Not only did my coaches say it was polite to thank people, but my mom was really big on me having proper manners – saying please, excuse me and always walk on the right side of the road,” Williams said. “It’s just common courtesy to say thank you for officiating our meets, thank you for coming. It’s just basic manners.”
Williams transferred to Upper Merion from Hatboro-Horsham in December of his junior year.
“I’m not going to lie – it was really stressful,” he said of the move. “Junior year is your important year, and I had to build up all over again.
“The only thing that was the same was running and lifting. Those were the only things that didn’t change after the move.”
Although he arrived too late to compete in winter track, Williams joined the track team that spring.
“What really shocked me at Upper Merion was – they took me in as a team very quickly and gave me time to grow,” he said. “It was great.”
Not surprisingly, the coaches had heard about Williams long before he set foot on the track.
“Jim Kelly came up to me last year and said, ‘You guys are getting one of the nicest kids you’ve ever had,’” Symonds said of the long-time Hatboro coach. “You hear that and think, ‘Yeah, right,’ but he didn’t exaggerate. Miles is a super, super nice kid.”
Williams has been competing in track since seventh grade.
“After I finished my first year of football in seventh grade, our coach said, ‘You guys need to do a second sport to get yourself in condition,’” the Vikings’ senior captain recalled. “All of my friends were doing wrestling and stuff, and one of my friends said, ‘Why don’t we do track?’
“I picked up track and pretty much stuck with it the whole way through.”
Williams’ specialty is the 400, the 4x400 relay and triple jump. Occasionally, he will run the 200 or 4x100.
Although he didn’t qualify for districts, Williams has been a consistent contributor for a young Viking squad that boasts just two seniors on its roster.
“What happened was this past track season our head coach actually left, so the team was a little unorganized,” he said. “A lot of our great seniors left this year as well, so all these freshman came in.
“We had over 25 freshmen and only two seniors on the team, and I was one of them. The other senior had to run a marathon for a project, so he wasn’t there as much. It was hard.
“Our school is not known for sports. We would go to meets, and these freshmen were going up against seniors, and they actually did pretty good. I was proud of them, and I did whatever I could for them. I always supported them all the way.”
Williams provided invaluable leadership to a young squad.
“Miles was the go-to person,” said Niemenski, who worked with both the girls’ and boys’ sprinters this year. “If you told him to do something, he did it.
“If you wanted a group to get something done and you needed a group to buy into it, you were like, ‘Miles...’ and he was like, ‘Alright, I got it.’ He would encourage everyone around him. He’s a very encouraging type of kid.”
And on a boys’ team that won just two meets, that encouragement was significant.
“We lost our first four meets,” Symonds said. “We were scoring 18 points, 16 points against Upper Dublin and Wisshickon and 30-something against Cheltenham. Wissahickon went out of their way to leave some of their kids at home.
“It was a long season. We have a very, very, young team. We only had two seniors, and it was painful for these guys.”
Talk to Williams, and it’s clear his team’s record was secondary.
“I’m going to remember the guys – not only did I work with the boys’ track team but also the girls’ track team,” he said. “It was a great group.
“I’m going to seriously miss them a lot. Most of them actually became some of my best friends because when I moved here I was so new, and track was something I could fit into. I really got along with those guys, and they became my friends pretty quickly.”
Track may or may not be part of Williams’ future. He is considering competing in winter track next year when he enrolls at Delaware Valley College where he hopes to major in biology with the goal of one day becoming a zoologist.
“Ever since I was a little kid my mom always told me that I would tell her I was going to grow up and go to Africa,” Williams said.
It was his love for animals that led Williams to volunteer at the Philadelphia Zoo where he is a Junior Ambassador but will move up a rank when he graduates in several weeks. One of his roles is to explain animal exhibits to the guests.
“I’ll take questions and answer them,” he said. “Sometimes during down times I’ll go to the children’s zoo and help clean cages.”
Williams points to the Aye Aye is the most interesting animal, and if you don’t know what an Aye Aye is, the Upper Merion senior will tell you.
“The Aye Aye is a nocturnal primate from Madagascar,” Williams explained. “It’s really cool. It has bat-like ears, wide eyes, a rolled-up snout and this big bushy tail. This creature is just so fascinating.
“Its one middle finger is longer than the rest, and what they will do is they’ll tap on tree bark and listen to try and find the location of where the grubs are. Once they find them, they will use their teeth to chew a little hole, and they’ll stick their finger in that hole to fish out the grubs. They do the same thing with sap. They’ll tap on the tree to see if it’s hollow or if it has sap in it. When they find it, they will bite a hole and fish it out with their middle finger.”
Williams has volunteered at the zoo the past three years, spending two days a week there during the summer and two days a month during the school year.
“A zoologist studies animals in their natural habitat, and I would like to go to Africa and focus on gorillas first,” he said. “Then I plan to travel to the Galapagos Islands to study the Galapagos giant tortoise and the marine iguana.”
Not exactly your ordinary career path, but then again, Williams is hardly your ordinary young man.
“He’s irreplaceable to our program,” Symonds said. “I expect we’re going to be a little bit better next year, but it’s not going to be quite the same without Miles.”
