Ex-Murrieta football player switching from gridiron to doctor’s office

A football player and a doctor wouldn’t seem to have much in common. One is out to hit people, the other to heal them.

Yet that’s what former Vista Murrieta High School and Arizona State University football star Kyle Williams is studying to become — a doctor.

And it’s a football injury that led to the unusual change.

Williams injured his shoulder in his freshman year in an Arizona State game and worked with Dr. Anikar Chhabra as he rehabilitated. In 2017, he was a research intern in orthopedic surgery.

As he noted: “The rest was history.”

“I started to shadow him and get experience with him in research,” Williams said. “Through these things, I fell in love with the medical profession.”

He still loved football, too, and after college graduation, was invited in summer 2020 to the Tennessee Titans’ training camp and hoped to play in the NFL during the peak of the pandemic.

Williams was cut from the team but his agent said he had other opportunities in football if he would just keep at it. Williams declined, thinking it was time to try a different dream — becoming a doctor.

He was a stellar student since kindergarten, said his mom, Carla, who lives in Winchester with husband, Kendall. So her son’s applying to medical school was not far fetched at all, she said. Williams also graduated with a biomedical engineering degree from Arizona State — no easy feat.

“Kyle has been interesting from the moment he was born,” Carla said, perhaps a sign that he was destined for great things.

Now he’s a first-year medical student at the Scottsdale, Arizona, campus of the prestigious Mayo Clinic Alix School of Medicine, a dream on the way to becoming true.

Another factor is his brother, Kendall, who died of colon cancer at age 33. Kyle Williams’ future medical career could involve early screening for people genetically susceptible to cancer.

“Losing our son just overall enhanced his desire to make a difference in the medical world,” Carla said. “He will always be an advocate for early detection.”

Kyle Williams grew up in the Long Beach/Orange County area and moved to Vista Murrieta High School when he was a freshman.

“At Vista, I was a new face, however it didn’t take long for me to get assimilated in the deep football and excellence culture at VMHS,” he said.

He played wide receiver and quarterback at Vista, then wide receiver and running back at Arizona State. Just being invited to an NFL training camp is an indication of how good he was at football.

Kyle has already achieved plenty and seemingly there is much more to come. Not that his considerable success is changing him.

“He has always remained very, very humble,” his proud mom said.

Kyle Williams hopes to be a surgeon, though he’s still exploring what kind he might be.

“It just comes down to what exactly is it that I want to see in my daily practice,” he said. “Surgery is amazing and having the opportunity to change someone’s life almost instantaneously is a great pleasure and privilege.”

Kyle agrees that changing from football to medicine “is a path that seems very confusing.”

“I truly believe that a lot of the principles that surround football are very central to the tenets of medicine,” he explained.

Teamwork, sacrifice and passion are critical to both endeavors, Kyle Williams said.

“Those are just a few words that you hear interchangeably with a hospital operating room or a sideline during the fourth quarter of a nail-biting football game.”

“Essentially, I look forward to learning from my brilliant peers who come from all different paths of life, while I’m still able to bring my unique perspective from competitive sports.”

Reach Carl Love at carllove4@yahoo.com