Willis hopes bowl game performance will springboard into senior season

Published 11:28 pm Wednesday, December 20, 2017

To say Damion Willis showed out Saturday night wouldn’t be doing his performance justice.

The former Southeast Lauderdale and East Mississippi Community College receiver hauled in 11 catches for 135 yards and two touchdowns for Troy to help the Trojans beat North Texas 50-30 in the New Orleans Bowl.

The 11 catches tied a New Orleans Bowl record set last year by Southern Miss’ Allenzae Staggers, who was also an EMCC product. With several Troy receivers out due to injuries, Willis said he knew he had to step up — and that’s what he did.

“Coach (Neal Brown) was calling the plays for me throughout the whole bowl practice,” Willis said. “We said we would try to throw a couple of short passes, then take the top off and throw deep, but the short passes kept working until they decided to press us. That’s when we started taking shots downfield.”

Following the game, Willis said he had over 30 SnapChat messages and and more than 50 texts messages, something he enjoyed seeing.

“My phone was blowing up,” Willis said. “Being you, you like to get a lot of attention. I’m happy to see people were watching the game. I was getting a lot of, ‘Great jobs,’ and, ‘Keep up the good work.’ That felt pretty good.”

Being able to share a bowl game record with Staggers was an added bonus.

“Coming from the same JuCo and being on the same platform is excellent,” Willis said.

As a whole, Willis described his season as up-and-down, but the strong finish will hopefully carry over into his senior season next fall. Playing in a pass-heavy offense like EMCC helped a lot for when he got to Troy, he said.

“East Mississippi is a spread offense,” Willis said. “They throw it a lot, and they teach you the routes every day. I pretty much run the same routes at Troy that I did at East, so it wasn’t too different of an experience. The only difficult part was the playbook.”

Willis said Troy’s playbook was much more complicated than EMCC’s, and it took a while for things to begin to click mentally.

“At East, the playbook was really simple,” Willis said. “It was just a short amount of plays that we executed very well. There are a lot of plays at Troy, so I had to really struggle (to get it). I got help from (fellow receiver) Deondre Douglas and the rest of the receiving corps and coaches.”

Troy finished its season at 11-2 and tied for first in the Sun Belt Conference with Appalachian State with a 7-1 conference record. Their biggest win, though, was a 24-21 victory at LSU on Sept. 30. As fun as beating the Tigers was, however, Willis said the following week’s loss to South Alabama is what prompted the Trojans to go on a 7-0 run to end the season.

“It was a good experience; not many people have that,” Willis said of beating LSU. “I think we had like a 10-percent chance of winning, so we shocked the world. It was a good feeling for not just us, but for Troy, us being a small Division I school, to pull that off.

“After we beat LSU, we came around and lost to our rival. That next day, we woke up at 5 o’clock and had a team meeting where we said we wouldn’t lose another game and would prepare like never before. We stuck to that and were able to be successful.”

Though he finished the season on a strong note, Willis said he’s not about to settle. Immediately in his future is plenty of trips to the weight room.

“I need to get more weight on and get faster and stronger,” Willis said. “That’s basically it.”

Willis is the son of Barbara Willis.