A week ago Sunday, Derrick Williams returned from an official recruiting visit to Oklahoma. The next day, he left for a two-day trip to Texas. He returned on Wednesday in time to meet with newly hired Florida football coach Urban Meyer and then left on Friday for a national player of the year press tour in New York that included stops on the Saturday morning "Today" show and ESPN2's "Cold Pizza," as well as meetings with reporters from Sports Illustrated, Sports Illustrated for Kids and ESPN the Magazine.
"Son has the world tour," marveled high school teammate Nico Scott.
The tour finally ends today, when Williams, considered by some the top high school football recruit in the country and the Washington area's highest profile prospect in recent memory, is scheduled to announce his college choice at a 3:30 p.m. news conference from Eleanor Roosevelt High in Greenbelt. The announcement will be shown on ESPNews; ESPN's various spin-off networks have been airing promotional spots for the announcement for a week.
Williams, a 6-foot, 190-pound playmaker, amassed a collection of more than 50 Division I scholarship offers from schools lured by his speed, strength and versatility. He will graduate this month and enroll in college in time for spring practice, where he will likely play wide receiver for the school he chooses today.
The Williams family has mounted a determined effort to keep Derrick's choice unknown, with Derrick recently getting a new cell phone number for the second time this fall. When a request for a cessation of media and recruiting phone calls failed, the family also considered changing its home number.
Even the coaches who are recruiting him said they don't know what to expect. Some joked that they are losing sleep over the matter, and said they had never seen a family as close-mouthed in the final days as the Williams family has been.
"We've got our fingers and toes crossed, everything that we can cross we've got crossed," one assistant coach said.
Speculation has centered on Penn State, Oklahoma, Florida and Tennessee, the schools that Williams visited with at least one of his parents. Penn State has courted Williams longer than any other school; his mother, Brinda Williams, was raised in Oklahoma and still has family about an hour from the university; Derrick Harvey, an Eleanor Roosevelt graduate and close friend of Williams's, plays for Florida; and Derrick's older brother, Domonique, nearly committed to Tennessee Coach Phillip Fulmer in the late 1990s before choosing North Carolina.
The visits to Florida and Penn State generated the most enthusiasm among family members, although interest in Florida cooled somewhat after the university fired coach Ron Zook about a month after the Williamses' trip.
Derrick has long complained about the repetitive nature of the recruiters' pitch -- "the same thing over and over and over and over; the colleges need to come up with some new stuff," he said -- and the past month has given him ample chance to think of suggestions. There have been 26 days since Thanksgiving; Derrick either met in person with a college coach or went to a promotional or all-star event on 23 of those days.
He watched part of the SEC championship game, featuring Tennessee, and the Big 12 championship game, featuring Oklahoma, but eventually flipped off the games in favor of his PlayStation 2. When Tennessee brought a half-dozen coaches to his home, Derrick said, he tried to think of excuses that would allow him to go upstairs and play video games.
"People don't understand how overwhelming this process can be, how much a toll it can take mentally and physically, and not just on him but on his family," said Eleanor Roosevelt Coach Rick Houchens, who has himself been under siege with questions from recruiters. " 'Where's he at right now, where is he leaning, is there anything we need to do that we haven't done, is there anything we've missed?' "
Williams's father Dwight, who this month met a Texas coach at a fast-food restaurant in the afternoon a few hours before an evening session with Oklahoma coaches, said he nearly fell asleep at work last week following a night of seemingly endless phone calls.
"I'm telling you, it's really getting to us now," he said after returning home from an outing dropping off invitations for Derrick's graduation party and shortly before an Oklahoma coach called. "It's affecting our jobs now. . . . It's affecting some of the personal stuff we want to do."
Williams's high school teammates have hazarded guesses on where he would wind up; several said he had indicated an early preference for Oklahoma or Penn State, one guessed that Texas and South Carolina would be finalists, another laughed that if Williams chose a Division III school the students would probably set their campus on fire.
"We're just as confused as everyone else," said All-Met tight end William Davis, also a Division I recruit. "The whole football team's confused."
Derrick Williams, though, seems to be enjoying his time in the spotlight. Having completed his final art project last week he roamed the hallways after school, hitting up a track team fundraiser for a free slice of pizza and joking with fellow students. He has toyed with several reporters about his decision-making process, letting them guess at his choice, and he said he's not yet worn down by the attention.
"My clock always ticking, baby," Williams said. "You only got one time to live -- might as well live it up."