Zac Williams wanted to make sure of one thing, when pre-season training started late last year. In his first four years at the GIANTS he had made his way off the rookie list, played his first 50 games, begun to feel like he knew the things he was good at and what his teammates expected of him each week. He had become the first graduate of the GIANTS Academy to play a senior game for the club, and been an important part of the first-ever finals side. 

There was something Williams had never done, though. He had never been picked to play in a round one team. So when his back started to feel sore just a few weeks into training, he got worried. And when he was told he had a stress fracture in his lower back and wasn’t allowed to train again until after the Christmas break, he felt even more anxious. It made him realise that when he was allowed to get going again he would need to make the most of every week, every day and even every hour, if he was going to break the trend. 

“It was something I’d never been able to do, and I really wanted to do it. I wanted to make sure I was finally there for round one,” said Williams, who knew he would need to move quickly and do more than he had ever done to give himself a chance. He came into the club every day while he was injured, to make sure he was still seeing people and not sitting at home on his own. He rested, and let his body recover. He organised extra cardio sessions when he was able to start training again, and spent more time in the gym. He did every little ‘extra’ he could think of and thought back to the same time in 2016, when he had had his best pre-season ever and the coaches still had not picked him.

“I knew I had to do everything I could, and I was feeling very nervous about it. When I first got the call to say I wasn’t going to train again until after new year’s it was five or six weeks away and it felt like time was slipping away from me,” said Williams.

“I was a bit down about it, but I knew that when I came back I had to really knuckle down because I wouldn’t have much time left to catch up. I was talking to the coaches and contacting our fitness staff all the time and asking them what else I could do. If it was an extra bike session or something in the gym or something else on my day off, I knew I just had to do it. I didn’t want to come in for round three or round four or round five, I wanted to be there from the start.”

The hard work worked. Williams made the first-round team and hasn’t been out of it since. Busy and bold, he has picked up where he left off at the end of 2016, feeling more confident to go after the ball, get it and run with it than he ever has before. That feeling has come from spending more time with the players by his side in the backline – Heath Shaw, Adam Kennedy and Nathan Wilson, most of all – as well as something much more simple, playing more games.

“It’s another year. More weeks, more games. And I’m older now. I’m not the little kid in the team anymore,” said Williams, who can remember feeling extremely young when he moved to Sydney as a teenager five-and-a-half years ago, as was as little uncertain. He became the first GIANTS Academy kid to get a go after being overlooked by every other club in the national draft, and only after doing a week of training with the club to convince them that he deserved a spot on the rookie list.       

“I think they liked me,” he said, "but I wasn’t too sure. They said, come up and train, and we’ll decide from there, so it wasn’t a shoe-in. I just had to go up there and show what I could do. I felt like I had a big point to prove, so I just put my head down and trained.”

To reach even that point was significant. Williams was just six when his father Steven died. He can remember going to watch him play games of rugby league at home in Narrandera, getting dropped off by him at school in the mornings and spending weekends with him at Auskick; for some reason his dad always thought he would turn out to be a better AFL than league player. Recently, Zac’s grandmother told him he reminded her of Steven when he was the same age, but it still feels tough to ask questions about him.

“It’s hard for her to speak about, so I sort of wait until she’s ready to bring something up and then we get to chat about it,” Zac said. “Even with Mum, I think it’s still a bit hard for her to sit down and chat about him, but in time we will, and there’s been a lot of bits and pieces over the years that have made me think about him and put it together and know what he was like. And we talk about everything else – me, my mum and my sister. I always say that what I’m doing now is because of them and because of all the things that they did for me.”

He means that. Williams’ sister Samantha is six years older than him, “so I got a bit shielded from the things she had to go through with dad, and she helped Mum bring me up. If I didn’t listen to what Mum was telling me then she made sure I did, and she was scary. Even these days, she has three kids and it’s like I’m the fourth kid in her life. I keep saying to her, ‘I’m 22 now, I live on my own, I don’t have to listen to you anymore.’ But she was always there looking out for me.”

She still is, as is their mum. Joy brought her two kids up while working full-time at a local school, and it was her who made Zac start thinking about what he wanted to do with his life when he was 16, into his footy but starting to skip school, stay out late and not listen to anything that she told him to do.

“She sat me down and said she didn’t want to see me hanging around the streets of Narrandera doing nothing with my life, and not thinking about my future,” he said. “I was off the leash a bit, at that age, I was a bit of a rat. I didn’t listen to people, I was hardly ever home. I was wanting to go out with my friends – go to parties and drink - and one day she just put her foot down with me and asked me where I wanted to end up.

“She didn’t tell me what to do but she made me think about it and get my act right, and I didn’t want to be one of those people on the dole that you’d see getting drunk at the local footy every weekend. She started the conversation, and everyone here knows I’m a very, very big mumma’s boy. Every time I see her I’m just hanging off her.

“When I first moved here I was homesick like most people, and struggling a bit. I was on a rookie contract and I only had a year to prove myself, but before I even got a game I rang her and said to her, ‘I don’t know if I want to be here, I’m up here all alone and I don’t really know anyone.’ 

“I felt like I’d jumped into the deep end, but she said ‘if you come home then you’re not living with me.’ So that scared me a bit, moving home to nothing. She asked me whether I wanted to prove myself or not and if she didn’t say that to me then it might not have turned out the same. She said, ‘give it time, you’ll start to feel settled,’ and that’s exactly how it was.”

And still is, on the field and away from it. “I’m more comfortable now,” Williams said. “I know I can play at this level, and I know that my teammates have confidence in me to play the way I can and take the game on. I think it just comes back to being older and being with everyone for longer. We’ve been together since we were 18 years old, pretty much. We’ve all moved here from somewhere else, we all know each other and we’ve grown up together. That’s helped me, to know everyone knows me and encourages me. But I think it’s helped the whole team out, because we all have that really close bond.”