Williams has stress fracture
Cavaliers' leading receiver to undergo surgery on Friday; return is uncertain
By Jay Jenkins / Daily Progress staff writer
August 8, 2006

Late in Sunday’s open practice, wide receiver Deyon Williams caught a pass, cut for the sideline and lost his shorts.

The senior co-captain, who offered a chuckle and addressed the crowd assembled just yards away, quickly retrieved them.
“Sorry about that,” Williams apologized.

The laughter and Williams were both absent from practice on Tuesday.
Virginia coach Al Groh told reporters during a teleconference on Tuesday that the team’s leading returning receiver has a stress fracture in his foot and will undergo surgery on Friday. Groh said Williams’ return to the team “is undetermined.”

Last season, Williams easily led the team in receptions (58) and receiving yards (767), while ranking among the top four in the ACC in receptions per game (4.87) and receiving yards (63.9).

The blow comes just days into a training camp that had Williams working with new quarterback Christian Olsen.

“[Williams] looked real good,” Groh said. “These injuries seem to be most common amongst basketball players, running backs and wide receivers - that is fairly good-sized athletes that make lots of full-speed cuts.”

In a meeting with Dr. David Diduch, the team’s orthopedic surgeon, Williams described where the pain was located in his right foot, helping to lead to the diagnosis.

“Dr. Diduch was very alert in, given the area that Deyon pointed out, having an X-ray taken and that’s what the X-ray showed,” Grod said.
Williams, who has a redshirt season available if needed, has been placed in a knee-high protective boot up until the surgery. Groh did not elaborate on the injury or the timetable for a return.

“I am moving on from this situation and I’m probably going to drop the Deyon Williams conversations for a while,” Groh said. “I feel bad for Deyon, but Deyon’s attitude is ‘Don’t feel sorry for me.’ That’s what he told the players and ‘Let’s get going’ so that’s what we are doing.”

Groh had raved about Williams’ progression throughout the past two weeks. In fact, Groh said last week that as he was leaving his office in the McCue Center he noticed a light on in one of the meeting rooms.

Williams was watching film.

“He’s really matured as a player,” Groh said last week. “Deyon’s a young man who really shows the benefits of being in college and maturing in all aspects, getting focused, and learning the things that are necessary to be successful.

“He’s done a commendable job with that.”

Groh said sophomore Kevin Ogletree and junior Theirrien “Bud” Davis, who combined for just nine catches last year, are among the candidates to replace Williams on the first-team offense alongside senior wideout Fontel Mines (28 catches, 345 yards in ’05).

“That position will be open to Ogletree, Bud Davis or anybody else who wants to lay claim to it,” Groh said.

Virginia opens its season on Sept. 2 at Pittsburgh. The ACC schedule for the Cavaliers, however, does not start until Sept. 21 in a road game at Georgia Tech.

 

'Hoos Who: Simon Manka
By Jay Jenkins / Daily Progress staff writer
August 9, 2006

Hold off on the Rudy jokes. Simon Manka has far more athletic ability than the legendary walk-on at Notre Dame, but the wide receiver admits there are numerous similarities.

Like Rudy, Manka’s fantasy comes true every day on a practice field as a walk-on football player.

Like Rudy, the undersized Manka has paid his dues throwing his 6-foot, 176-pound frame around on scout teams with a simple goal of making his teammates better.

Life as a walk-on is not pretty at times but don’t tell that to the former Virginia lacrosse player who shifted sports to accomplish something he was obsessed with since kindergarten.

“The dream for me … I am living it. I am playing right here. I am playing right now for this Virginia team,” Manka said. “When I was choosing schools I chose Virginia for the academics, the good lacrosse and the good football. They had everything I wanted.”

Thanks to an accomplished lacrosse career at Orchard Park High (N.Y.), Manka got the attention of UVa coach Dom Starsia. He joined the program in 2004 and played in six games, but football was still on his mind.

He started by asking Starsia for permission to leave the program to pursue football. He followed up by picking the brain of UVa’s strength coach Evan Marcus.

“I made it easier because I had networked a little coming in,” Manka said. “I kind of used who I knew to get into football, and I’m working from the bottom up.

“It was intimidating, but I always thought that I could do it.”

Leaving his teammates and some of his closest friends on the lacrosse team was tough as one might imagine.

“I was playing with them for two years and had some pretty strong bonds with them,” Manka said. “It was tough to leave them, but I had it in my heart ever since I was five - I have always wanted to play college football.”

The former high school running back joined the football team last year and dressed for seven games without reaching the field.

He never complained.

He was too busy trying to learn the small things about playing wide receiver at the highest level of college football.

“Technique is a whole other animal in football,” Manka said. “There are so many things that I didn’t even know coming into football that I would need to know. It was a lot more complex than I ever knew.”

Give credit, Manka says, to his position coach.

“Coach John Garrett is so technical. He breaks down everything,” the 21-year-old said. “He is easy to understand and one of the greatest coaches that I have ever had. He has helped me out a lot with that.

“I think it was more of an understanding thing than a physical thing for me to be able to cut it out here on the field.”

With a stable of wideouts ahead of him on the depth chart, Manka knows his best chance to play is on special teams. And that’s just fine and dandy.

“The only way to [play special teams] is to go hard all the time,” Manka said. “Coach Garrett is always telling me to get noticed.”

Al Groh noticed. The Virginia coach named Manka the scout team Player of the Week last year the week prior to the Miami game.

“You have to be tough every play and that’s exactly what Coach Groh stresses,” Manka said. “That’s what I try to do every time that I am out there. I try and go full speed, I try to be tough and I try to take the coaching.

“The better that I do those things, the better I look to them. That’s about it.”

Scores of walk-on players have been noticed in the past, many of whom Groh has rewarded with scholarships.

Is that part of Manka’s dream?

“I would play for free for 20 years if I could get in a game,” Manka said.

Rudy would be proud.

 

U.Va.'s Williams out
Stress fracture opens wide receiver position
BY JEFF WHITE
TIMES-DISPATCH STAFF WRITER Aug 9, 2006

CHARLOTTESVILLE -- Deyon Williams, an all-ACC candidate and the University of Virginia's top wide receiver, will undergo surgery to repair a stress fracture in his foot and is out indefinitely.

U.Va. coach Al Groh, on a teleconference with reporters yesterday afternoon, disclosed the injury and said Williams' "return from that is undetermined."

The Cavaliers opened training camp Friday, and Groh said Williams had "looked real good" in practice. But the 6-3, 185-pound senior from Upper Marlboro, Md., complained recently about soreness in his foot Groh said he wasn't sure which one -- and an X-ray revealed a stress fracture.

"I feel bad for Deyon," Groh said, "but Deyon's attitude is, 'Don't feel sorry for me.' That's what he told the players."

Athletes typically are sidelined at least six weeks -- and often longer -- after such operations.

Williams, a team captain, is coming off a breakthrough season in which he earned all-ACC honorable mention and caught 58 passes for 767 yards and seven touchdowns. For his career at U.Va., he has 85 catches for 1,150 yards and nine TDs.

Virginia opens the season Sept. 2 at Pittsburgh. In Williams' absence, Groh said, the "position will be open to [Kevin] Ogletree, Bud Davis or anyone else who wants to lay claim to it."

As a true freshman last year, Ogletree caught seven passes for 27 passes. Davis, a junior, has three receptions for 54 yards as a Cavalier.

 

Gould focused on goal
Junior expected to fill roles of two departed U.Va. stars
BY JEFF WHITE
TIMES-DISPATCH STAFF WRITER Aug 9, 2006

CHARLOTTESVILLE He never scored a touchdown, never intercepted a pass, never made a tackle. Still, all-ACC kicker Connor Hughes left a void that U.Va. coach Al Groh knows will be difficult to fill.

With due respect to such departed stars as Marques Hagans, Kai Parham, D'Brickashaw Ferguson and Wali Lundy, Groh said, "I'd probably rather have Connor Hughes than almost anybody else, for what he did for the team."

No wonder Chris Gould feels pressure. The 6-1, 205-pound junior from Lock Haven, Pa., is the leading candidate to replace Hughes, who holds several records at Virginia, including career points (332) and career field goals made (66).

Gould, 20, is likely to also take over as the Cavaliers' kickoff specialist, a job held the past four seasons by Kurt Smith, a sixth-round pick of San Diego in this year's NFL draft. Smith led the ACC in touchbacks last season.

"Any time you replace somebody as good as Connor Hughes and Kurt Smith with one guy . . . that's a lot of pressure to put on one player," Gould said after practice Sunday.

That said, Gould is eager to test himself.

"You have to be," he said. "In this business, if you're not up for a challenge, then why are you out there playing?"

Gould, whose brother, Robbie, kicks for the Chicago Bears, enrolled at U.Va. in 2004 and expected to redshirt that season while serving as understudy to Hughes and Smith. Late in the season, however, punter Sean Johnson's struggles convinced Groh that a change was needed, and he summoned Gould for a meeting five days before U.Va.'s pivotal game at Georgia Tech.

Groh asked Gould what he thought about punting in Atlanta.

"I just smiled and said, 'OK, Coach,'" Gould recalled.

He averaged 43.7 yards on seven punts in the Cavs' win over the Yellow Jackets and kept the starting job through the end of last season. Assuming Ryan Weigand's punting pleases Groh, however, Gould will be able to concentrate this season on his specialty: kicking off the ground.

When he was in high school, Gould attended a kicking camp at Ohio State and booted a 65-yarder to win the longest-field-goal competition.

"Distance has never been an issue, but accuracy, I've had some trouble. It's hard to contain such a powerful leg, I guess you could say," Gould said, smiling.

For Hughes, accuracy rarely was an issue. In his U.Va. career, he made 66 of 79 field goals. Hughes was 50 of 55 from 39 yards or closer.

Gould said he's still trying to grasp "the mental aspect of the game. I know, by talking to my brother and other players that he knows, that the more you mature, you learn that you only have to swing 80 percent when you kick a field goal. That'll make you more accurate, and I'm learning that: to control my body enough so that I can hold back to 80 percent. It only has to go over the bar, is what I have to understand. I don't have to put it up in the stands, over the net."

Noah Greenbaum, a senior who attended Collegiate School, also is a candidate for the kicking jobs.

"Clearly Chris isn't going to make every kick this year, but he won't miss any of them because he's intimidated by the situation," Groh said.
 

Former U.Va. coach leads national team
U.S. will make initial trip to football worlds
Staff Report

VIENNA — Former University of Virginia head football coach George Welsh will lead the United States national team during the third World Championship of American Football next year in Kawasaki, Japan.

USA Football selected Welsh, who also coached at Navy, for the Americans' first time participating in the world championship, which is run by the International Federation of American Football.

"It's a distinct privilege and honor for me to coach the first U.S. team in the World Cup of American Football in Japan next summer," said Welsh in a USA Football press release. "Personally, I'm very enthused about this opportunity to return to the sidelines after a hiatus of six years."

Welsh's 45-man team will be composed of college players who complete their eligibility during the 2006 season. NCAA and NAIA schools will each have the opportunity to nominate two seniors for roster consideration.

The U.S. will compete against two-time defending champion Japan, European champion Sweden and Germany. Two more countries will qualify through play-in tournaments in Europe, Asia and the South Pacific later this year.

Welsh, a 2004 College Football Hall of Fame inductee, coached 28 years at Navy and Virginia. During nine seasons at Navy, he led the his alma mater to three bowl games. During 19 seasons at Virginia, he led the Cavaliers to 15 winning seasons and 12 bowl games.