With the Chicago Bears on their bye week, Taylor Doll had an opportunity to divert from her usual in-season Making Monsters game preview podcasts and get into the stuff she loves: diving into the players' backgrounds. In her latest show, she spoke with two coaches who were instrumental in developing Caleb Williams through his teenage years on the gridiron: Randy Trivers, his head coach from Gonzaga College High School, and Danny Schaechter, his offensive coordinator.
“It doesn’t take long to see that this is a talented person relative to people that he’s around," Coach Trivers said about his former QB. "Whether you’re seeing him as a youth league football player, a high school football player, a college football player and now in the NFL. You see it doesn’t take a genius to see this guy has some really, really uniquely gifted athletic gifts.”
“When you get around him and you kind of see what his rhythms are, what makes him tick, his energy, then you kind of get a better feel for how and why he is who he is and what he is," Coach Trivers said about Williams. “He’s always had the competitiveness, that charisma, that drive, that poise. Some of those things that you see him have, and now that we’re a few games into his NFL career, you see some of those things sort of coming out in him and how he impacts others around him.”
Williams carries himself like he has a love of the game, and Taylor asked Coach Trivers about that even back in high school. “You used a good word when you talk about his love of the game. A lot of times, players/athletes are excited, and they give a whole lot of their heart in the heat of competition, but the thing that’s really interesting about Caleb that I think helps him be that guy that’s a little bit better than most at what he does is his passion for the game in terms of how he prepares."
Coach Trivers heard the doubters when Caleb and the Bears started slow.
“I know the Bears, in the first 3 or 4 games, they had a couple losses, now they’re on a nice streak, but there are people who are gonna doubt, people that are gonna go, ‘Oh wow, this guy’s supposed to be this, and he’s not doing this, or we expect this, and it’s not happening.’ Just him having the right demeanor, the right heart, and mind to be able to expect those things and be able to handle them without them derailing him.”
“There have been games where he’s been statically outstanding, like most recently, as you pointed out, and then games where perhaps he’s more pedestrian, but even in those games where it’s about protecting the football and winning the game so as much as Caleb is this dynamic player that makes these spectacular plays and can light up the stat sheet in a number of ways, he’s all about winning. So it’s more important, he was like that here, it’s more important that the team wins than it is he throws the ball 40-something times for 300 plus yards”
“He has a very, very high standard for himself. So people can critique him but it’s likely that his standard is higher than anybody else would have for him.”
The whole interview with Coach Trivers was outstanding, but that's just half the show. The other half features Williams' former playcaller, Coach Danny Schaechter, who is now the offensive coordinator for Libertyville (IL) High School.
“Caleb has always been Caleb,” Coach Schaechter told Taylor on the podcast. “He’s a cool dude, and he’s able to be cool like that because it’s genuine, you know, it’s not a facade, it’s not false bravado. He is an upbeat person who cares a lot about other people, and he wants to do the right thing. So, when you put all of those things together, it’s like, yeah, you got a good person right there, and then he’s his own person on top of that. He’s not afraid to just be himself.”
Williams play style we're starting to see in Chicago, is the same way he played in high school.
“He is very talented running around with the football. He’s made some crazy amazing superhero pro-style plays when he’s running, but he would much rather distribute the football to his weapons and use his legs as a last resort," Coach Schaechter told us. "If we needed Caleb to air it out 70 yards, he could go do it no problem on a dime, but there were some times in some games where we were like, ‘We’re gonna need you to run the ball 25 times this game.’ and he’d be like, ‘Great, I’ll do it if that’s what we’re gonna do'"
Taylor's Making Monsters was a fantastic peek into the person Caleb was, and you can hear in all in the embed below or wherever you get your podcasts.
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