Former Penn guard Jelani Williams sang a lullaby to lift Howard to the NCAA Tournament

Jelani Williams wasn’t a good free throw shooter when he was younger. So his father, Kyle, taught him a trick to clear his mind when he toed the line.

Kyle used to sing Jelani a lullaby when he was helping him get to sleep as a young boy. The trick to making free throws? Just sing the song.

Athletes tend to be creatures of habit, so there was Williams Saturday afternoon in Norfolk, Va., on the free throw line in the MEAC championship game, his Howard Bison down one point to Norfolk State with six seconds left on the clock. Make two free throws and Howard is in the NCAA Tournament for the first time in 31 years.

Norfolk supporters were making noise to distract him. His teammates were counting on him. So Williams, a transfer from Penn, started to sing the words in his head.

Put your arms around me, buddy. Hold me tight. Cuddle up and cuddle up with all your might.

Williams got through the first half of the song before releasing the basketball. Tie game. Timeout Norfolk State. Can you really ice a guy who sings lullabies in the heat of the moment?

Williams stepped back on the line. The crowd revved back up, but he had a song to finish.

Oh, Jelani, I’ve never loved anyone like you.

The free throw dropped. Down the other end, Norfolk State inbounded to the man Williams was guarding. A well-defended baseline drive resulted in a miss, Williams throwing his arms in the air as the game clock expired — a celebration years and many missed games due to injury in the making.

“It’s something I’ll remember for the rest of my life,” Williams said in a phone interview with The Inquirer Wednesday from a hotel room in Des Moines, Iowa, where 16th-seeded Howard takes on No. 1 Kansas in a West region matchup.

In a way, Williams called this shot. “I will play in the NCAA Tournament,” he had said when he announced he was leaving Penn after the 2022 school year. Williams led all scorers with 20 points off the bench in the MEAC final, three off a season-high.

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Williams is a graduate student now, but this is just his second year of college basketball. His first was last year as a senior and co-captain at Penn, where his first three years of college basketball were ruined by three ACL tears and a pandemic.

Choosing where to go next to continue that journey became rather simple after Williams, a Washington D.C. native, visited Howard. He had attended eighth grade on Howard’s campus at a public charter school focused on STEM. He could come back home, play in front of his family and friends and others who hadn’t seen him play since he starred at Sidwell Friends.

“There are certain moments where life kind of aligns for you and it feels right and it feels like where you’re supposed to be at that point in time and that’s how I felt when I visited Howard,” Williams said.

It made sense in off the court, too. Williams was a big part of Penn’s social justice activism during 2020 and beyond. Howard, one of the nation’s foremost HBCUs, was a place where Williams could continue that work.

Penn, Williams said, “is where I found my voice.”

But the focus of Penn’s protest, Williams said, was “rudimentary.” He majored in communications with a focus on advocacy and activism, and minored in Africana studies.

“I was able to gain a lot of knowledge around history and all the things that go into play,” Williams said.

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At Howard, where Williams is also a team captain, the work has gotten a little more “niche,” Williams said.

Howard coach Kenny Blakeney challenged the team to come up with a social justice project. In the aftermath of the overturning of Roe v. Wade, that project is the issue of Black maternal health and the implications of the case reversal on Black women.

Being at Howard, Williams said, has “given me an opportunity to get more creative with the way we advocate.”

The basketball has worked out, too. Williams enters the NCAA Tournament after posting 9.2 points, 4.4 rebounds and 2.1 assists in 25-plus minutes per game.

He scored just two points in Howard’s MEAC quarterfinal win and six in the semifinals. But he dominated in the final, getting his 20 points while shooting 6-for-11 from the field — including 1 of 2 from beyond the arc — and 7-for-8 from the free-throw line.

There were plenty of times, through those three ACL tears and all the recovery that comes with them, that all of this had to feel so far away.

“When you play basketball, especially in college, there are long preseasons, long seasons, long postseasons, and with them comes a lot of ups and downs,” Williams said. “For me in particular, with my health, some days my body feels great and some days it doesn’t, where I feel like I can’t practice that day.”

Williams has all of that perspective in place when he answers the questions: did he ever think this day would come? To be sitting in a hotel room in Des Moines, resting up for a date in the NCAA Tournament with the No. 4 team in the country?

“I wanted to and I said publicly I wanted to play in the NCAA Tournament,” he said. “If I told you I knew this was going to happen, especially the way it happened, I’d be lying to you.”

An improbable path, indeed. Maybe only believable if it were a lullaby.

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