Max Williams knew something had happened. He could feel it in his left knee as he planted awkwardly during a punt return in the first game of the season, but he managed to jog off the field and convince himself that it wasn't serious.
Or try to, at least.
"I kept playing and I was just running a regular jog and I took a step in the ground and it just like buckled again. And then I was done," he recalls.
But that wasn't the most painful moment.
"Then I got the call after my MRI saying football season over, tore your ACL, tore your meniscus, a 7-9 month recovery. And that just broke me down," says Williams, who was watching his Junipero Serra High School teammates practice when his phone rang.
"That was horrible. Every time I think about that I get emotional. It was real rough. I was crying. It was just horrible. And it was on my birthday too so that made it worse. My dad actually showed up because my coach called him. I couldn't talk to nobody at the time."
Williams is now 11 weeks into his recovery from the ACL tear and slight meniscus tear in his left knee, every week moving him further from that jarring moment back in late August and closer to competing for playing time as a freshman cornerback at USC.
Williams had been silently committed to the Trojans since August, but he didn't announce it until October. In between, neither he nor USC wavered, though, and that last part meant a lot to him.
It was the day after he got that call from his doctor delivering the bad news that USC coach Clay Helton called him with a much better message.
"That was actually something that uplifted my spirits," Williams says of their 20-minute conversation. "They were still interested in me and they said nothing changed in how they feel about me. And because they know the type of person I am and my work ethic, they knew I was going to come back stronger than I was before."
And so he went to work trying to do just that.
Last week, Williams took TrojanSports.com inside his rehab process and the work he's doing to return to the field.
