College sports’ unlikeliest championship coach: ‘When they hired me, (my dad)

Editor’s note: This is part of a series in which The Athletic highlights offbeat sports you may not have known are contested at the college level. Follow the full series here.

Melrose Lanes closed shop in the late 2010s. But in the summer of 1998, John Williamson, a walk-on wide receiver at Ole Miss at the time, was a regular at the Nashville bowling alley. Especially on Wednesdays.

“They used to have a $5-all-you-can-bowl,” Williamson said. “I had some friends — there were like four or five of us — and we would go. We would spend like eight hours on Wednesday, from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m., just bowling.”

Williamson, a native of nearby Franklin, Tenn., was home for the summer to work out with friends to prepare for the upcoming football season. To the chagrin of his father, Rod Williamson, he made no plans to land a summer job or line up an internship. So when John and a group of buddies started to spend their afternoons bowling, Rod — a longtime Vanderbilt athletic communications employee — had little interest in hearing about his son’s exploits on the lanes.

“He had told me that he and his team — they got into a league — had won the league or something,” Rod said last week, recalling his frustration. “And it caught me at the wrong time and I, out of exasperation, said, ‘You know John, I am really glad that your bowling is going so well. But would you do something that would someday get you a job?’

“That’ll be one that I never quite live down.”

Fast forward 25 years, and the younger Williamson recently visited the White House to celebrate his third national championship as Vanderbilt’s bowling coach. Despite having no previous competitive bowling experience, Williamson landed the job when Vanderbilt started the program in 2004, at least in part because of his reputation as a stellar recreational bowler. He was 27 years old.

Now in his late 40s, Williamson has led the Commodores to the Final Four 10 times and won those three national titles. He has coached three national players of the year and 26 All-Americans, and he recently won the national coach of the year award for the fourth time. With just over 100 programs fielding bowling teams nationally, including about 40 at the Division I level, Williamson has become one of the sport’s best.

“When they hired me (my dad) was floored,” John Williamson said. “You’re sitting at this table (for coaches meetings) and you’re like, ‘There’s Bobby Johnson. There’s Kevin Stallings.’ These are all these big-time coaches.

“And then there’s me.”

Williamson played his final season of football at Ole Miss in 1998, serving primarily as a practice player. Having won all-state honors in football and all-city honors in baseball as a high-schooler, he’d grown up around sports in Nashville, where Rod was a mainstay in Vanderbilt’s athletic department before retiring in…