From the moment he first touched a soccer ball when he was 9, JJ Williams knew he wanted to be the player making a difference for his team.

Fast forward to today and Williams is an integral part of Birmingham Legion FC and its recent success entering tonight’s home game against St. Louis FC.

“The first time I played as a child, I scored two goals,” Williams remembered. “And it just took off from there. I just had it in me to want to be that player.”

Williams, 21, is one of the rare Southerners on the Legion FC team, hailing from Montgomery (he was born in New Mexico, but moved to Alabama before he was a year old) and then playing college soccer at Kentucky.

Being back in Alabama, just over an hour’s drive for his retired parents to come see him play, has been a wonderful homecoming.

It’s also been a revelation about how the sport of soccer, and the passion it instills in fans, has grown in the state and region.

“I definitely feel like soccer’s growing around here,” he said. “From when I first started to now, you can see the big jump. Growing up in Alabama, schools didn’t even have teams. But now you see players sticking with it and it’s been growing a lot. I love being able to inspire younger kids, because we were all them at one point.”

“And to have a USL team here in Alabama, it’s huge,,” he said.

Williams is one of four loaner players from Major League Soccer teams to play for Birmingham this season. The other MLS loaner players for Legion FC are Zach Herivaux, Eddie Opoku and Brian Wright.

After scoring 122 goals in high school in Montgomery and playing at Kentucky, he was drafted in the first round of the 2019 MLS SuperDraft by the Columbus Crew SC.

Williams went back and forth between Columbus and Birmingham at the start of the season, but now he’s settled in to being with Legion FC for the remainder of the year.

He currently leads the team in scoring with six goals and has been an integral part of the offensive attack during a stretch that has seen Birmingham go unbeaten for nine straight games and put together a league-leading six-game shutout streak that stretched throughout July and most of August.

The team is poised to make the playoffs in its debut year in the USL and currently sits in ninth place with eight more regular-season games remaining. The top 10 teams in the league’s two conferences advance to the postseason.

Williams credits the recent run of success with a number of things, but said that team chemistry is a big part of it.

“It was hard to find a rhythm when were moving back and forth between teams. We didn’t really connect with the rest of the players,” Williams said. “But now I have it in my mind that I’m not going back (to MLS) this season, so I’m going to make the most of it here in Birmingham.

“When we were losing early on, of course you don’t expect this type of success, but now we see it,” he said. “Zach, Brian, myself, it was hard for us to see the big picture when we kept going back and forth. But now we’re all here and buying into it. We can do something special.”

Williams said he and his teammates have clear goals in mind.

“Our first goal is always to win, especially at home,” he said. “We want to continue to grind out wins and be tough. And I want to be the best player I can be, and do whatever the team needs me to do to win.”

That passion to be the playmaker who makes a difference to his team has driven Williams his entire life.

Williams said he discovered soccer when he wandered into his brother’s practice as a young boy, and the coach asked if he wanted to play in a game that evening.

He began practicing alongside his brother and hanging out every day at the soccer facility. He’d tried basketball and football -- “I’d always want to be quarterback, because he was the playmaker," he said. --but soccer soon became his passion.

And from that moment, he had a one-track mind and focus.

“It became the only thing that mattered,” he said. “I wanted to be a professional soccer player.”

That dream has become a reality, and Legion FC is now the benefactor of it.