No. 1 HS Recruit Cooper Flagg Announces He’s Headed to Duke on the Cover of SLAM 247
Newport, Maine.
Population…roughly 3,000.
It is here where the epicenter of the biggest story in high school basketball originates.
It is here where one of the most highly touted high school prospects in recent memory began his hoops odyssey.
A journey that technically can be traced back to the early 1990s. That’s when Cooper Flagg’s mother, Kelly, was turning heads on the hardwood at Nokomis Regional High School on her way to scoring 1,257 career points. Nokomis would become the same school where almost three decades later, one of her three sons would begin capturing the attention of the basketball universe.
Kelly went on to play DI ball at the University of Maine from 1995-99, where she embarked on an incredible run that included four consecutive American East titles and making appearances in the NCAA Tournament all four years. Her senior year, when she was the team captain, Kelly was a starter and led the Black Bear over Stanford to the program’s first and only NCAA Tournament win.
She was already a Maine hoops legend in the ’90s, but her contributions to the game were only just beginning.
Enter…Cooper Flagg. It wouldn’t take long for Kelly to notice that Cooper—born seven years after her collegiate run and a minute after his twin brother Ace—wasn’t the typical elementary school kid. Looking to challenge him, she enrolled him on a 4th grade rec league team—as a 2nd grader.
“I remember the ball was going out of bounds on the baseline, the other team’s end of the floor. He jumped up in the air and palmed the ball. Cooper didn’t just chuck it back inbounds to anybody, he kept it in play and found a teammate at the same time. Moments later, he sprinted down to the other end of the floor and caught it for a layup. I don’t know that I’ve ever seen a 7-year-old have those kinds of instincts,” she recalls. “It was apparent to us that year when the rec season ended that he needed more. That is not what you normally see in a 7- or 8-year-old kid.
“There were a lot of weekends we went to play and they would only have five or six kids,” she adds. “As a second grader, he never left the floor and would just be exhausted because they would play two or three games in a day. The next year, we got him on a team as a third grader with fifth grade boys. That was a really good fit for him. Their team played more of a five in, five out style.”
“I remember the first couple of practices just being really tough. I would come out really tired and exhausted,” says Cooper. “I think I had a bunch of bruises. It was just really rough to start out because of how much older everyone was. I was also just as tall as them from a really young age, so I didn’t really feel out of place, but you could tell that they were more physically developed than me… That’s something that I look back on and I’m really thankful for. Both of my parents always pushed me to play against older competition. It helped me to develop a lot earlier.”
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