Getting your Trinity Audio player ready...

By ANDREW SIMONSON | Sports Editor

HOOVER – It was business as usual for Spain Park wrestler Bradley Williams at a Southeast regional tournament in Atlanta, Georgia in September 2024. Fresh off his first Class 7A state championship and an undefeated school season, he was out to prove his skill against some of the region’s best.

However, under the surface, things were anything but usual.

Williams had just made one of the easiest weight cuts of his career to get under the 141-pound division limit. The reason it was easy was because a silent thief was stealing all of his water weight–Type 1 diabetes.

Fighting a battle on two fronts, he managed his newfound diagnosis while never losing a step as a wrestler. His success in 2025 led him to a second-straight undefeated season and state championship, and now, he is the Shelby County Male Athlete of the Year among a crowded field of talented stars.

However, his journey is just now starting as the rising senior has his eyes on gold once again, but this time while representing something bigger than himself.

 

Strike hard, strike fast

Before any of Williams’ success with Spain Park, he was just a kid following in his father’s footsteps.

Williams was four when his family moved to Alabama, and his father Jeff put him in Stronghold Wrestling, an Alabaster-based club almost immediately after the move.

Jeff had a wild ride himself in his wrestling career as a pair of knee injuries in high school derailed his hopes of competing in college. However, about 20 years later, his nephew got into wrestling and won a bet with Jeff that forced him back into wrestling.

From there, Jeff coached Bradley at Stronghold and resumed his own amateur wrestling career, placing second in the 2016 US Open before transitioning to jiu jitsu and winning worlds in 2021.

Like his father, most of Bradley’s success came after an unheralded start. Unlike many of his nationally-ranked peers, Bradley never won a youth state championship and only started rising the ranks later in his youth career.

It took an innovative move to flip the switch. He added in a chin whip, which is when a wrestler puts their opponent’s neck in between the shoulder and forearm like a jiu jitsu guillotine choke, except they turn their body to whip their opponent to the ground to set up a pin.

Bradley added it to his arsenal at the end of his sixth-grade year and quickly gained notoriety around the state for it. He executes it to frequent success in varsity competition, and his dad even compared it to a legalized version of Cobra Kai’s famous leg sweep from “The Karate Kid.”

“It even works here at the highest level that he’s at now, if you can get people kind of out of position and such,” Jeff said. “So, it’s pretty wild to watch if you like watching big throws.”

The chin sweep unlocked a new level of his game, and shortly after, Spain Park called Bradley to join its varsity team as a seventh grader. He immediately succeeded, making the 2021 Class 7A state championship by going 34-0 before running into Oak Mountain’s Camden Tipton in the 106-pound finals.

That experience only motivated Bradley to keep working hard to win as much as possible at the varsity level.

“Going only one loss, undefeated in seventh grade in the high school division really just made me not accept a loss,” Bradley said. “So, once I got older, I think my skills improved. I think just knowing that going undefeated is attainable, I just didn’t accept any losses.”

He repeated the feat as an eighth grader and ninth grader, finishing runner up in the 126-pound division in 2022 and 138-pound division in 2023 after winning the North Super Section championships in both seasons. He finished his eighth-grade year 39-10 and went 55-3 as a freshman.

That 8-7 decision loss in the 2023 state title match to Huntsville’s Jake Ciccolella, a rematch of the sectional finals that Bradley won, remains his most recent varsity defeat.

Since then, Williams has won 108-straight matches for the Jags, including a 45-0 record in Class 7A to win the 144-pound division and a 54-0 record in the 2024-25 season to claim the Class 6A 157-pound championship. None of his matches at state in 2025 made it past the 2:30-mark before he earned a pin.

Bradley credits his experience as a middle schooler wrestling up on varsity for setting the tone for the rest of his career, including his two state championships and five-straight finals appearances.

“I’m glad my coaches gave me a chance to wrestle when I was in middle school, because I think without I became a two-time state finalist just as a middle schooler in high school,” Bradley said. “And I think that really just showed me how good I was. And I think starting out freshman year and not knowing that, I might not have done as good with the rest of my career and stuff.”

 

Sugar, we’re going down swinging

However, genetics threw Bradley a massive curveball before the start of his junior season.

In September 2024, Bradley prepped for the Southeast regionals by cutting down from 150 pounds to the 141-pound division, a routine cut for him.

Something was different though.

“I have wrestled so many years. I’m used to cutting weight,” Bradley said. “Most times for like nationals, I’d be cutting 20 pounds, and it’s always hard, but for that tournament, I didn’t cut the weight at all. It just fell off. I never had to wear sweats at practice or really be intense with cutting my weight. It just fell off. And it was strange to me. I was fine with it, because I didn’t have to cut the weight.”

During the cut, his parents said he got up four or five times a night to go to the bathroom, which was highly unusual for him. However, Jeff wasn’t initially concerned.

“As a parent, I’m like, ‘That’s weird,’” Jeff said. “I’m an old guy, right? I get up in the middle of night, but for him to get up that many times, it was weird. And then, of course, the coaching side of me is like, ‘Well, he’s flushing a lot of water out. He’s training a lot. So, he’s going to make the weight pretty good, right?’”

Sure enough, he made the weight well. With five pounds to spare at 136 pounds.

Bradley got increasingly sicker and weaker as the tournament approached, but the hope was that rehydration after weigh-ins would get him back to himself.

That wasn’t the case. Bradley continued needing frequent restroom trips all throughout the tournament, and it started to become a concern.

“The next day, I had a couple parents come up to me from out-of-state, go, ‘Hey, Bradley’s been cutting a lot of weight. He looks kind of gone,’” Jeff said. “And I’m like, ‘Yeah, it’s been kind of weird.’ He goes, ‘I don’t know, Jeff,’ because he was going to the bathroom every second of that tournament. And it just it got to the point of that tournament, if he wasn’t wrestling, he was in the bathroom. And so, a couple parents are like, ‘I think that might be diabetes.’ And we’re like, ‘No, that can’t be.’”

Type 1 diabetes runs in the Williams family as Bradley’s cousin was diagnosed at 18 years old. However, they never thought Bradley would get diagnosed himself.

But after the Williams family rushed to Children’s of Alabama following the tournament, his glucose readings were off the charts. Bloodwork revealed his glucose level was 850. A normal level is 130, and Jeff said 850 should’ve left Bradley in a coma.

That led to a three-day hospital stay, Type 1 diabetes diagnosis and plan to combat it from then on. He now takes insulin three times a day as well as a long-term insulin shot each night.

Not much has changed in Bradley’s personal life. He still eats about the same as he did before, just now with insulin. He also quickly returned to the wrestling mat at the Elite Eight, but not without one major change–his weight.

Before diabetes, he was around 150 pounds walking around and cutting to between 141 and 144 for wrestling. Almost immediately after starting insulin, he shot up to 163 pounds, so he cut to 157 pounds for the state championship. He’s planning a move up to 165 for his senior year as he continues growing into his new natural weight.

A major downside to having diabetes though is having to manage his insulin alongside weight cuts. Jeff said the constant fluctuation of weight makes wrestling one of the most dangerous sports to have diabetes in.

Bradley now views it as a positive as now he’s not wrestling while sick and instead filling out his natural weight.

“It makes it dangerous for when I do cut weight, because my sugar would drop fast, and then that would make me not able to compete or just become weaker and stuff,” Bradley said. “So I haven’t been able to cut weight as much, but I think with the insulin, it’s made me fill in a lot more to my weight, so I think I haven’t had to cut as much weight, but I’ve also filled into the weight that I am, so really, there’s not any weight to really cut.”

While diabetes didn’t affect him during his undefeated run to the postseason, he did have a speed bump thanks to a skin infection that flared up as a result of his diabetes. It jeopardized his spot at the state championship, but he overcame it quickly enough to get to Huntsville and secure his second-straight title.

 

Never satisfied

Bradley has goals beyond his two state championships. In the near future, he will compete in the Junior National Duals championship in Milwaukee, Wisc. before taking the mat at the individual national championships, known in the wrestling community as simply Fargo for its location at North Dakota State’s Fargodome. He will also compete in the Elite Eight and Super 32 in hopes of boosting his national rank ahead of his senior season at Spain Park.

He also recently accomplished a major longtime goal of committing to a Division I school. Bradley is set to wrestle for Davidson College in North Carolina after his senior year with the Jags.

While he has his sights set on a third-straight state title and undefeated season, he is now even more motivated to compete at a high level collegiately because of his diagnosis. Bradley said he knows of at least two Division I wrestlers who also have diabetes, but he wants to be an example for others with the disease that they don’t have to be limited by it.

“I’m happy that I’m committed to a Division I college a year after getting my diabetes diagnosis because I’ve kind of shown that people don’t need to be restricted by really anything personally,” Bradley said. “I just think it’s not a factor that you should see and think that it stops you. You should just overcome it, and no matter what happens to you, like through your life, you can always just find a way to overcome it, find a way to get around.”

It’s a mantra and mentality which Bradley lives by on and off the mat as he never rests until he reaches his goals. But now, he carries an entire community on his shoulders as he aims to redefine what a life with Type 1 diabetes looks like.