For Bills rookie safety Duke Williams playing in New Orleans is a homecoming of sorts. He was raised in Monroe, Louisiana, which is a few hours north of New Orleans, but has siblings who live in the Crescent City.
“I have family that live in New Orleans and I have family in Monroe,” Williams told Buffalobills.com.
Williams lived in Monroe until he was 12 then his mother put in for a job transfer to Reno, Nevada and got it. Though his mother and sisters were not affected by Hurricane Katrina, his family left Louisiana less than a year later.
“We moved a few months after Katrina. Monroe wasn’t really affected by the storm, but my mom and sisters moved after some of our family left too,” Williams said. ”It was something new. It was a good transition. It was kind of hard. I have a two uncles and an aunt in Reno, but the rest of my family is still in Louisiana. I’m going to have a lot of family at the game.”
Williams has cousins and five stepsisters in New Orleans.
Spending his teenage years in Reno, Williams lived right down the street from the University of Nevada-Reno, which is where he wound up playing his college ball.
“It was my mom’s decision to go out there. It was something she wanted to do. It worked out well. Growing up I was an LSU fan, but things worked out differently. It’s great that I still had an opportunity to play college ball. The school was right down the street from where I lived. My high school and the college were two minutes away from each other. We had camps there every year so it wasn’t hard to go play for Nevada.”
And his exploits at Nevada obviously presented the opportunity to now play in the NFL.
