From MIT to the Tibetan plateau: how a US basketball player and his team of nomads became stars of a documentary
Willard ‘Bill’ Johnson’s love of basketball has taken him all over the world, only to discover that his passion lies in coaching a team of former Tibetan nomads
Growing up I was born in 1986, in Everett, a town about an hour north of Seattle, in the United States. My dad’s father – he was the second Willard, I’m the fourth – spent his whole career in the US Navy, he was involved with submarines. My father joined the navy as a pilot and then went to work for Boeing, which is how we ended up in Everett. My mom is a nurse and I’ve got an older sister and a younger sister.
Growing up, I was always a bit taller than the others in my class, but in middle school I shot up. My body grew so fast I wasn’t prepared for it. I was really uncoordinated and goofy. Being tall helped with sport. I started out playing basketball, baseball and soccer and, as I kept growing, I shifted more to basketball. I’m six foot seven or eight (about two metres). The prospects of playing basketball at college were higher.
There were opportunities in some universities for sports scholarships, but I wanted to go to MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology), which didn’t offer scholarships. I wanted to go partly for the academic side, but also I was drawn to the opportunity to help the (MIT basketball team) get to the next level. I always liked maths and studied management sciences, focusing on finance as political science.
High times I started at MIT in 2005 and in my freshman year we went to Taiwan. I’d been to England with my family, but this was my first real understanding of what an international trip meant. There were teams from lots of countries and I loved being immersed in a different culture.
That trip was the beginning of a lot of things for me. When I came back, I focused on Taiwan and wrote my thesis on it. In my senior year, I played with some really good players and we won the league championship. After I graduated, I stayed on for three years as assistant coach during the basketball season, which lasted five or six months. In the off season, I played internationally.
Bouncing around The first place I went was Costa Rica and I played in the national league there. I loved it. You play on a team and from day one you are part of a community despite differences of language and culture. Then I went to Iceland. I split my finger open in a practice session, which ended up being fortuitous because I got to coach the MIT team to the semi-finals of the national championships.