Tom Williams continues to have great impact on the CAL
By BRIAN CUNNIFF
Staff Writer
Tom Williams played junior varsity basketball and varsity baseball at Ocean City High School.
But his impact on Cape-Atlantic League sports goes way beyond anything he ever did on the court
or in the field.
As a teenager and high school student back in 1961, Williams realized that the Sentinel-Ledger
newspaper was lacking in coverage of high school sports. So he submitted a preview story of Ocean
City High School’s Thanksgiving Day game and the newspaper published it. Pretty much every week
since, Williams has extensively covered all aspects of high school sports, along with articles and columns
on just about any sport at any level.
This year, Williams is celebrating his 50th anniversary as a sportswriter, one who’s been equally
dedicated to both his craft and to the people he’s covered.
He’s written for a variety of publications over the years, from the Sentinel to the Philadelphia Inquirer,
occasionally for the Courier-Post and others, all the way to his decade-plus of service to the Gazettes and
Currents that fall under the Catamaran Media umbrella.
When he first started as a sports writer, Ocean City High School had only five sports and all of them
were offered for boys only. He was there to witness and record the development of girls sports in the
1970s, the addition of sports such as soccer, field hockey, tennis and golf at the high school level and,
more recently, has seen the development of swimming, lacrosse and even ice hockey throughout the CAL.
His main focus has been the sports teams at Ocean City High School, but Williams has covered the
entire CAL with vigor, reporting on games, crafting impactful feature stories and filing timely, poignant
columns and opinion pieces.
Williams has been around for a long time but he’s certainly not a relic. Unlike many of the “old-timers,”
in sports writing who initially shunned the proliferation of electronic media, Williams embraced it. He’s
been a radio broadcaster – an award-winning one at that – providing play-by-play of mostly high school
football and basketball since the mid 1960s after getting his start as a statistician under Ralph Glenn
and Gene Packard on WOND broadcasts during the 1964 state championship season by the boys
basketball team at Ocean City High School.
Then later, Williams was among the first to use web sites to promote and chronicle high school sports.
Currently, his PrimeEvents.net web site is among the most viewed sports web sites in the region; his
OceanCitySports.com site is one of the most comprehensive sports web sites dedicated to a single high
school; and Cape-AtlanticLeague.com brings his CAL information together. These days, he also uses
Twitter and text messaging to spread the news about local high school sports to followers eager to receive it.
Through both longevity and his own meticulousness with keeping records, Williams has become the
most trusted unofficial historian for the Cape-Atlantic League. There isn’t a sportswriter in South Jersey
who hasn’t tapped Williams for his vast knowledge of the history of CAL sports.
Through the years, Williams has fashioned a direct, fluent style of writing, never missing facts and
always touching on what’s important. And he has an uncanny knack for writing about tough issues in a
fair and balanced manner (Tom may not appreciate the vague reference to the Fox News Channel, but
you get the point).
He’s gone above and beyond in his promotion of high school sports and the athletes in the Cape-Atlantic
League area. In addition to his writing and broadcasting, Williams coached various youth sports teams
in the past, has staged numerous basketball showcase events, has developed a computerized statistical
service for basketball that’s been used from the Boardwalk Basketball Classic in Wildwood to the NJSIAA
championships and, together with his sister, has established a college scholarship fund in his late mother’s
name at Ocean City High School.
His work in the area goes well beyond local sports, too. He covered the Miss America Pageant in Atlantic
City for decades, promoted concerts and musicals through The Young Entertainers and to this day is still
a voter for college football’s prestigious Doak Walker Award.
Williams is easily one of the most recognizable names in CAL sports. Just about every athletic director
and coach in the CAL is well aware of his work. And practically none of them has ever had a bad word to
say about him.
It’s remarkable to do anything for 50 straight years, but it’s even more remarkable to be a sportswriter
for community newspapers for five decades. There’s no doubt Williams has had opportunities to move on
to a bigger stage, but he’s always stayed loyal to his employers and extremely loyal to his readership and
community. It’s obvious money and the egotistical thrill of seeing his byline in a major metropolitan newspaper
haven’t been Williams’ driving force.
After even 20 years in the business, many jaded, tired sportswriters are ready to stop typing for good
and move on to something else. Williams has instead chugged forward with virtually the same energy but
simply with different, more sophisticated tools. Gone are the days of typewriters and cut-and-paste
newspaper layout. These days, Williams gladly strokes the keys of PCs, laptops, cell phones and other
electronic gadgets as if he’s ready for 50 more years in a job he’s done as well as anyone over the last 50.
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