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Strong Wills

• Ellington Willis has had doors closed on him his entire football career, but the Wildcats' defensive lineman is hoping he finally has opened the right one.

Colin Chmielewski

ALBANY — When he played for the Macon Knights last season, Ellington Wills would walk to practice.

So when South Georgia Wildcats head man Derek Stingley called a few weeks ago and asked him to come to Albany, jumping on a bus from Detroit seemed like nothing.

The road Wills has traveled during his football career has rarely been a smooth one — and he’ll take responsibility for some of that. But this year has had more potholes than any other.

The tackle and half-sack in last week’s win against Florida don’t even begin to tell the story of the Wildcats’ defensive lineman.

Those are just numbers from his newest opportunity; his most recent challenge.

True, Wills is trying to make his mark — again — with the Wildcats, the team that traded him earlier in the season, but it takes more than that to understand a guy who has spent much of his career trying to be understood.

Start with the eight-year-old boy playing football for the first time — the one who got beat up going up against future NFL player Larry Foote. He decided he’d rather play basketball and not get hit so much, that is, only until his brother Carlos — 14 years his senior — says something that would drive Wills for years to come.

“If you want to succeed at anything, you’ve got to go through the person that gives you the hardest time,” Wills recalled his older brother saying. “You’ve got to win over the person that gives you the hard time, because once you win over that person, he’s always going to believe in you.”

Wills won over plenty of people on his way to a football scholarship at Michigan State under Nick Saban. But after his first year, Saban left for LSU. Wills didn’t feel like he fit in with the new coaching staff, and he left for Hutchinson (Kan.) Community College. Wills played a year there, and then was supposed to go to Virginia, but he was declared ineligible after not graduating from Hutchinson. So he tried to go to Hampton, but again he didn’t fit in.

“Just the politics of playing football kind of got on my nerves,” Wills said. “So there were two years that I didn’t play at all.”

Wills is the first to admit that his personality was rough around the edges, which may have made it more difficult for him to find a football home. So after two years away from the game, he arrived in the af2 with the Manchester Wolves, but was released after four games.

That release brought the lineman to Stingley, who was then in his first year as coach of the Macon Knights. But the new coach and the fast-talking Detroit native didn’t get off on the right foot.

“Ellington was a different guy back then,” Stingley said. “He was a little harder to understand as a person. At that time, I was a young coach. I wasn’t putting up with a whole lot.”

Stingley released Wills after a couple weeks, but he stuck around Macon.

When the 2006 season rolled around, Wills started showing up at the Knights’ camp. But there was one catch: he hadn’t even been signed by the team. Wills kept coming to practices, begging Stingley for another chance.

The way Wills was getting to practice, though, was anything but easy.

“I was staying with one of my cousins, and the bus didn’t go all the way to the practice facility,” Wills said. “So I had to ride it to a certain point and then walk it the rest of the way to practice. I just wanted to get my foot in the door with a good (coaching) staff that was going somewhere.”

Once Wills accomplished that, Stingley finally rewarded his persistence with a roster spot, though the relationship didn’t flourish without its difficulties though. Wills liked to talk, but Stingley and line coach Randy Leindecker didn’t want to hear it. There were periods when the duo didn’t even allow Wills to talk during practice — which ended up being a lesson in itself.

“Coach Stingley and coach Leindecker, they taught me more how to be a professional, not just on the field, but it’s your habits with your teammates,” Wills said. “The things that you say and the way you present yourself. They showed me how to clean up myself around the edges.”

Stingley said once he got past Wills’ outer shell, their relationship grew.

“If you don’t know Ellington, his attitude comes off like this hard guy,” the coach said. “But to me, he’s comic relief. He’s a funny guy. He makes me laugh. I just got to know him. I didn’t know him as a person (before).”

So when Stingley opened camp this March with the Wildcats, it was no surprise to see the 24-year-old there.

But before the season began, Wills’ road back hit another pothole: Carlos was killed while being robbed in Washington, D.C.

After the tragedy, Wills left the team for three weeks to be with his family. While he was away, he thought about the message Carlos had passed along when he was younger.

“He was strong-willed,” Wills said. “He had a strong backbone. He would not want us crying and mourning and not being able to get back to what we’re doing. He’d want us just to keep persevering in this life.”

Wills returned to the Wildcats, but it wasn’t the same. Roster spots had been given out and he was left off the active roster when he came back.

Wills finally saw action in the fourth game, against the Tennessee Valley Vipers, and recovered a fumble for a touchdown. But with the prospect of going back on the inactive list looming, he knew less playing time meant more time to think about Carlos.

Wills talked to Stingley and they worked out a trade to the Fort Wayne Fusion. But after one game, Wills said it wasn’t the right situation and was released — returning home to Detroit.

Two months later, Stingley was back on the phone, with a need for a defensive lineman and called Wills, who dropped his new job and headed to Albany on a long bus ride.

“I was happy because it’s where I wanted to be,” Wills said. “It’s the staff I wanted to play for. It’s the guys that I wanted to play around.”

And his teammates — some of the same ones who didn’t understand him in Macon — are glad to have him back.

“He’s got a little more oomph in his step now,” lineman Courtney Young said. “Guys are behind him 100 percent because we know what he went through. Everybody went through (getting released) at one point in time in their career.”

Wills knows he still has to get back in game shape, but in the meantime he’s also filling an important role for the Wildcats with nose guard Joe Woolridge sidelined.

Although, maybe more important has been the impression he has made on his coach.

“He loves to play football,” Stingley said. “He’s doing what he wants to do. We’re giving him an opportunity, and he didn’t let a whole lot stand in his way of still trying to play a game in which he loves. That just shows you how much he’s grown as a person. Because for all I know, the old Ellington would have shut it down.”

Somewhere along the long and bumpy path that brought Wills to the Wildcats at this crucial point in the season, the player that nobody took the chance to understand is now starting to finally understand where he’s going.

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