Quinnen Williams wants to give you a hug.
At 6-foot-4, 265-pounds, Williams swallows you up with his big arms and a smile on his face. The Alabama commit is fierce on the field yet gregarious walking the hallways, offering hugs to anyone who'll accept one.
"You hug too much," his football coach Ronald Cheatham teases him.
But there's a reason the Wenonah defensive tackle, ranked No. 14 on AL.com's A-List ranking, goes out of his way to give hugs.
"I like to make sure everybody feels at home when they're around me because I don't know what they have going on at home," Williams says. "At Wenonah, some players go through stuff at home. I just make sure everybody smiling and having a good time around me.
"If I make sure they have a good time, they don't have to think about what's going on at home when they are out there playing football."
He knows from experience.
It'll be five years this Aug. 10 that Quinnen lost his mother Marquischa to breast cancer. Her sickness caught the family off-guard: At that point she was a five-year cancer survivor, and everything looked good. But the cancer came back, boy did it come back, and it quickly ravished the emotional backbone of the Williams family. Two months after learning cancer had returned, she was gone.