December 2024 ~
One doesn’t have to be a rocket scientist to understand how deserving Peter Williams (Lincoln, 2011) is of his place in the PIL Hall of Fame. His athletic and academic achievements in high school and college speak clearly for themselves.
That said, on the off chance any questions did exist, they could be referred directly to Williams who’s as close to a rocket scientist as most people are likely to get.
Not that anyone will succeed in getting Williams to boast about his own accomplishments. The point here is, it’s simply not possible to profile an MIT aerospace engineering graduate without taking advantage of the once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to shoehorn a legit rocket-science joke into his story. (No matter how forced and lame that joke winds up being, it had to be done.)
However, in the process of checking an item off a writer’s bucket list, the natural order of this subject’s profile has been disrupted. So it’s time to go back a few years and into the Williams family home in southwest Portland. There, Steve and Janet, both attorneys, are raising three mighty competitive boys, all destined to be high academic and athletic achievers.
Matt, the eldest, “set the bar high in terms of academics, athletics and a lot of other things,” says Peter, the middle one. And with younger brother John coming up behind him, Peter had to stay on his toes just ensuring he maintained his position a step or two ahead. This family dynamic inspired regular brotherly backyard battles, whether in basketball, football, baseball or “you name it,” Peter says, writing in his Hall of Fame bio, “We pushed each other to get better, grew a passion for competition and learned to win and lose with grace (at least most of the time).”
While the Williams’ sports interests ran the gamut of “you name it,” Peter became the first of the brothers to play organized football when a friend coaxed him into turning out for the third-grade team at Bridlemile Elementary. He took to it immediately. “I loved the game and have appreciated all the valuable lessons I was able to get out of it, from elementary school through college,” he says.
At Lincoln, Williams would earn three letters as the Cardinals’ quarterback, making 2nd Team All-PIL as a junior before earning PIL Player of the Year, 1st Team All-PIL and 2nd Team All-State honors as a senior. He tied a bow around his high school football playing days by being named MVP of the Les Schwab Bowl.
Williams also earned four letters as a defensive-minded guard/forward on the Lincoln basketball team.
“I wasn’t the biggest scorer,” he says. “I had a few good scoring games, but I played hard on D. I always liked the challenge of trying to shut down the other team’s best guy.”
Williams was part of a squad that in short order turned around the fortunes of the Lincoln hoops program. In his sophomore year, the Cardinals made it all the way to the state championship before losing to Jesuit in the final game.
“That’s one of the best sports memories I have,” he says. “Coming off a freshman year when our team wasn’t all that great, we started playing well with the team we had brought together. Making the playoffs and playing three games down at the old Mac Court in Eugene was special. We won two games there before losing to Jesuit, but to play in that historic facility with the atmosphere and everything around it was awesome.”
In terms of team accomplishments, Williams experienced the most success in a sport he didn’t even pick up at Lincoln until his junior year. “I’d played lacrosse a year or two in middle school but didn’t go out for it at Lincoln until I was a junior,” he explains. “Like basketball, I really liked playing defense. But in lacrosse I got to do it with a six-foot pole. Made it a little easier.”
The Cardinal lacrosse team won state championships in both years Williams played, and as a senior he earned All-America honors after being named 1st Team All-State.
Despite all the time he had to devote to practice and games, Williams also excelled in academics. In fact, he attributes some of his academic success to his participation in sports.
“Having to practice at the same time every day made me more disciplined and able to regiment my time better,” he says. “Sports created a consistency that proved valuable to me academically.”
With two attorney parents, it’s no surprise that Williams had considered pursuing a law career. But as he progressed through school, he says, he found himself drawn more to science, engineering and math. That’s what led him to a summer camp at Dartmouth College prior to his senior year. And that’s where he met the football coach at MIT and got his first real exposure to the school and its football program – which got him thinking the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, no matter how prestigious, probably wasn’t for him.
“I left that conversation thinking MIT didn’t sound like a very fun place to go,” Williams remembers.
But the coach persisted, Williams wound up applying, and in the fall of his senior year he learned he was in – if he wanted to be.
“Even then I wasn’t sure I was going to go,” Williams says. “I wanted to enjoy a complete college experience; I didn’t want to only be hitting the books. But I went ahead and visited MIT, had a really good time and was able to meet other people like me there. I got a sense that it would be a good spot for me, so decided to go for it.”
Though MIT is one of the most respected academic institutions in America, no one is going to mistake the Division III school for a sports juggernaut. But the Engineers do field a football team (among others) in the New England Women’s and Men’s Athletics Conference, and for three years Williams would excel as the squad’s quarterback. He made the All-NEWMAC League team and as a senior led the squad to its first-ever undefeated season. Williams left MIT as its all-time leading passer.
“My first year there the team only won one game,” he remembers. “But by the end of my senior season we had taken the team to a new level. Academically, MIT definitely was tough. But again, sports helped keep me regimented. Overall, it was an enjoyable experience.”
Williams graduated from MIT with an aerospace job already landed, accepting an offer he had received from Amazon his senior year. He worked in the company’s drone program until 2022, when he and a friend (and his center) from MIT co-founded Muir AI, a company devoted to helping corporations better understand and learn how to mitigate the climate impact of their products and supply chains.
“I’m a big outdoors person, and while at Amazon I was seeing the significant increase in events, like wildfires, tied to climate and it was driving me to want to do something more meaningful than getting packages delivered within 30 minutes via drone.”
Williams’ love of the outdoors was nurtured when he would watch from the shore while his parents windsurfed on the Columbia River until he was old enough to take up the sport himself. He still enjoys it today along with kitesurfing and “virtually anything else on the water.”
Williams now lives in Seattle with his wife, Sally, and their dog, Keeper.
If you know Peter Williams and would like to reconnect, he can be reached at [email protected]
Note: click on a photo to see its caption.
~ Profile written by Dick Baltus (Wilson, 1973)
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