Zafir Williams powering Long Beach Poly's playoff push

Nobody saw Zafir Williams coming.

As it tus out, that was kind of by design. The 6-foot-6 junior powerhouse for Long Beach Poly has been putting up video game numbers for the Jackrabbits this year, leading them to a third straight Moore League title despite the absence of senior and Hawaii-bound guard Drew Buggs for most of the season.

“Z is one guy where you know exactly what you’re going to get from him,” Poly coach Shelton Diggs said earlier this year. “He’s a double-double machine.”

Indeed, he had a double-double in all but two Moore League contests this year, both of which were wins over Cabrillo. The 20.6 points per game and 14.1 rebounds per game from Williams has been the difference between a good year and a bad one.

While the Jackrabbits missed out on their goal of being an Open Division team, they did defend their league title (which is shared, this year, with Compton), and they also entered the playoffs seeded No. 1 in the Division 1AA bracket, as favorites to win a 21st CIF-SS championship, most in history.

But typically players who can put up numbers like that in a Division 1 league have been on the AAU meat market for years, starting travel ball in sixth grade or earlier. The last Poly player to score 30 points, as Williams did in a 36-point, 19-rebound master against Millikan, was Roschon Prince, who is now at Long Beach State, Prince was already well-known by the time he was playing middle school basketball at Hughes, having spent years on the travel circuit picking up rankings and attention.

Williams? He was at Pan American Park from the time he was six years old, leaing the game in a less stressful environment. He played every sport he could there and didn’t start focusing on just basketball until he was in high school — his parents, Lumumba and Njemila, also kept him out of travel ball until ninth grade, a rarity among today’s youth athletes.

“They wanted it to be like a surprise,” said Williams. “My dad wanted me to work on my game and to grow as a player instead of just worrying about exposure.”

Of course, that development wasn’t done in a casual way. Williams remembers entire summers during middle school when his dad would take him to the park at six or seven in the moing to work on fundamentals and drills for a few hours until other players started arriving for pickup games. Then Williams would join in until four in the afteoon when he would head back home with his dad after 10 hours of hoops.

The result? When Williams arrived at Poly, he was a gifted, physical player with a rare ability and desire to get rebounds, playing much bigger than his 6-6 frame. It also meant he was a virtual unknown, as Poly coaches raved about his skill set and anticipated how much fun it would be watching him surprise other teams for the next four years. Williams got some playing time as a freshman on Poly’s CIF-SS championship team, and then really burst onto the scene as a sophomore, averaging 12 points and eight rebounds per game.

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This year? Well, everybody knows about him by now. One reason for that is his unique name, which has spawned a host of nicknames, everything from “World War Z” to simply “Z.” It’s a name that Williams is proud of, and not just because it brings the kind of attention that his lowkey approach to leaing the game eschewed.

“I’m very proud of my name and of my African-American heritage,” he says. “A few kids teased me about it when I was younger but it never really bothered me.”

So what does Zafir mean? In a word, “victorious.”

A fitting name for a player who’s helped lead Poly to an 18-9 start, a league title, and the top seed in the 1AA bracket. Now, Williams and his teammates are hoping to win a lot more—even if everyone will see him coming now.

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The Jackrabbits will host Moore League foe Millikan Tuesday night at 7 p.m.

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