How Will Johnson's unique background prepared him for Arizona Cardinals debut

Back in the early 2010s, there was a common sight on any patch of grass and dirt in the city of Detroit that offered enough space for a few football drills.

On one side, the city’s most successful crop of players in a generation would go through practice, charting their paths to Michigan, Michigan State and beyond. On the other side, a little kid, no more than eight or nine, would watch along.

“He couldn't wait to get his opportunity,” Deon Johnson remembers, digging into old memories of father and son.

More than a decade later, that kid has a new opportunity, one that will unfold this fall in front of millions of people. He is Will Johnson, the rookie cornerback who carries the hopes of a reborn Arizona Cardinals defense. When they selected him in the second round this spring, it represented the value of the draft, a potential superstar whose perceived injury concerns made him available 40 picks later than his talent suggested.

Already, he’s made an impression far beyond his years.

Jonathan Gannon, his head coach, said that Johnson has “picked up everything really quickly,” ahead of the Cardinals' joint practice with the Denver Broncos on Aug. 14.

Defensive coordinator Nick Rallis described an “intelligence to be thinking ahead” of opposing wide receivers.

Ryan Smith, the cornerbacks coach, doesn’t believe the college-to-NFL transition fully applies to Johnson. That’s how far ahead he is.

It shows up on the field. In practice, Johnson often looks to be running wide receivers’ routes for them. In college, his preternatural anticipation enabled him to intercept nine passes in 32 games — more than any other player in the sport’s two major conferences.

“He's knows what the opponent's gonna do,” said LaMar Morgan, Johnson’s position coach at Michigan.

Watching film with Johnson, Morgan often felt like he was sitting with a member of the coaching staff. During position meetings, Johnson could predict receivers’ routes ahead of time based on the tiniest details. Which foot is ahead of the other? How far is the receiver from the offensive line? What does the first step of his release look like?

“I've always been able to pick up the game pretty well and be an instinctive player,” Johnson told The Republic. “I feel like that hasn't been too hard for me.”

Will Johnson's introduction to playing sports

It all goes back to those early mornings and late afternoons on the fields of metro Detroit.

When his only son was little, Deon didn’t let Will play tackle football. A former Michigan defensive back himself, he knew the game’s dangers.

Instead, Will grew up on a medley of sports. The family spent weekends shuttling to soccer practices, baseball games and flag football scrimmages. But even then, his obsession was clear.

In 2004, Deon founded a football program, Sound Mind Sound Body, with an old friend, Curtis Blackwell. It seemed like every free minute was occupied by the program. And wherever Deon went, so did Will and his sister, Kayli.

“Our extracurricular activity was being around Dad,” said Kayli, who is now the director of on-campus recruiting at Michigan.

That meant standing on the sidelines at practice, watching everything the high school players did and dreaming of becoming them one day. But it wasn’t only about football.

The creation of Sound Mind Sound Body stemmed from an observation. When Will was born, Deon Johnson and Curtis Blackwell were both coaches at Detroit’s Martin Luther King Sr. High School, one of the state’s premier talent factories. But no matter how many games they won, their best players weren’t drawing the attention of college programs.

“It was just us (realizing),” Blackwell said, “the top kids from Detroit just don't make it to college 'cause they get in trouble.”

Johnson and Blackwell saw that as an opportunity. They leveraged their connections with Michigan to bring Wolverines coaches to football camps in the city — a tantalizing prospect for any aspiring college football player.

But in order to participate in those camps, players had to attend life skills sessions. The organization rented out classroom space, taking kids through SAT prep and tutoring for their high school classes. They broke down football film, too, just like a college team would. To keep playing in the football camps — a year-round afterschool endeavor — players had to bring weekly progress reports from their schools to prove that the new lessons were sticking.

Two decades later, Sound Mind Sound Body has helped revolutionize the talent pipeline in southeast Michigan, building Detroit back into a football hotbed. Today, the program has its own dedicated classroom and field space thanks to grants from the state of Michigan and the U.S. Department of Education. This year, six of its alums were drafted into the NFL, and more than 60 earned college degrees. Blackwell smiles when thinking of the kids who otherwise might not have made it out, like Derrick Harmon, the Steelers' first-round pick.

“Man, he had little to nothing,” Blackwell said. “… We struggled like heck. We had to get him shoes, we had to help him get to college visits. … To see him turn into what he has is another proud, proud representation of who we are.”

Learning perspective through football

For Will Johnson, this created the ideal combination. He grew up with all the comforts of two caring parents in Grosse Pointe, a wealthy enclave east of Detroit. His parents met at Michigan, and his mom is a professor of library and information sciences at Wayne State University.

At the same time, he was exposed to teammates with opposite upbringings. As a young kid, he learned the difference between those who made it and those who didn’t. When a talented player didn’t earn college offers, Will would pepper his dad with questions — and be met with the hard truth.

“Man,” Deon would tell him, “you gotta make sure you go to school, get your grades and focus so you can pass your tests.”

As he grew older, Will began sitting in on tutoring sessions and film study himself. By the time he was in sixth grade, Deon let him participate in certain drills with the high schoolers.

One summer, Will successfully lobbied his parents to go on the road with Sound Mind Sound Body’s 7-on-7 team, just so he could serve as their ball boy. Here he was, still years from high school, sharing a hotel bedroom with future NFL players like Jourdan Lewis and Delano Hill.

“It impacted me a lot,” Johnson said. “Just being around a lot of high-level guys at a young age, just getting that experience, those reps that most kids don't get. I definitely felt like it set me apart and gave me a confidence and savvy of when I play the game, just knowing how to move on the field and having that instinct.”

There’s one play, years later, that lives vividly in the minds of Johnson’s high school coaches.

It was the third game of his high school career, against Warren Mott. Johnson, in a rare occurrence, was beaten inside on a deep post route. But with his back to the quarterback, he stuck his right hand out like an outfielder attempting a leaping backhanded catch at the warning track.

Somehow, even though the receiver had both hands on the ball, Johnson was able to reel it in.

“It was literally the best interception I've ever seen in high school football,” said Tony Cimmarrusti, an assistant coach.

This was the product of Johnson’s unique pathway. Long before he ever put the pads on in a game, he and Deon would go into the backyard and work on his skill development. At five years old, he did the same drills backpedaling and breaking on the football as Deon’s high schoolers did. He learned to run the route tree shortly after he learned to walk.

In flag football, he played with an under-nine team as a six-year-old. He started going to high school camps when he was in sixth grade. His recruitment began when he was in eighth grade, and a reporter mistook him for a junior in high school.

“He was always playing up,” Blackwell said.

That’s how a prodigy gets his start. By the time Johnson committed to Michigan, he was a consensus five-star, the 15th-ranked recruit in his class per 247Sports. He lived up to the billing, earning consecutive All-American selections and winning a national championship.

There’s been no sign of slowing down, not since those early days in Detroit, when he laid the foundation for his career through osmosis. The career that is now, finally, where it was always destined to end. On the doorstep of his NFL debut.

This article originally appeared on Arizona Republic: Will Johnson prepared for Cardinals debut through unique perspective