Maine man Cooper Flagg

The anticipation built with each tick of the clock.

A throng of starstruck elementary-school kids eagerly craned their necks for their first glimpse of America’s most celebrated teenaged basketball prospect.

When Cooper Flagg and his twin brother announced that they were returning to their home state of Maine to hold a two-day youth basketball camp this past August, all 125 spots sold out by the next day. Parents from across Maine and beyond forked over $149 to give their son or daughter the chance to meet Flagg and to get hands-on instruction from the soon-to-be Duke freshman.

On the morning of the camp, early arriving kids lined up outside Memorial Gymnasium in Orono, some clad in Duke jerseys, others clutching posters they hoped to get signed. Organizers added to the intrigue by keeping Flagg out of sight as campers entered before theatrically introducing the 6-foot-9 wing to applause and squeals of delight.

“To be honest with you, it wasn’t just the kids who were excited,” Matt Mackenzie, Flagg’s longtime trainer, told Yahoo Sports. “Adults were in awe of him just as much as the kids were. They were all asking for photos and autographs.”

Excuse the people of Maine if they’re a little overenthusiastic that the projected No. 1 pick in next year’s NBA Draft is one of their own. They have waited an awfully long time for the Pine Tree State to produce a nationally renowned basketball prospect.

Maine basketball hall of famer Andy Bedard describes his hoops-crazed state as “a mini-Indiana but without the Division I talent.” Basketball is big in Maine, but the state has proven to be barren soil for growing top-tier prospects. A native of Maine has not been selected in the NBA Draft since the New Jersey Nets took Jeff Turner in 1984. The University of Maine, the state’s lone Division I program, has famously never made the NCAA men’s basketball tournament.

While Maine occasionally exports high school talent to top college programs, the J.P. Estrellas and Nik Caner-Medleys are the outliers. None of Maine’s past 10 Mr. Basketball award winners have earned Division I scholarships. Most played D-II or D-III ball. One walked on at Maine and has scored one basket in two seasons.

“I can count on one hand the high-major guys who have come out of Maine,” an ex-Division I head coach told Yahoo Sports. “There was no reason to go up to Maine to recruit very often.”

And yet somehow, a state long ignored by college coaches and NBA scouts has bred one of men’s basketball’s rising stars. Flagg will make his long-anticipated college debut on Monday night when Duke hosts Maine of all teams, another surreal moment in his first-of-its-kind journey from small-town New England.

Says Bedard, Flagg’s longtime AAU coach, “It’s like the Jamaican bobsled team. This is something that you think happens somewhere else.”

‘Is he really in the second grade?’

Kelly Flagg admits her passion for basketball wasn’t the only reason she started showing up to her town’s community center to watch adult-league games as a junior in high school. She hoped to catch the eye of a tall, blue-eyed community-college player a few years older than her.

“I thought he was really cute and I was looking for opportunities to be wherever he was,” Kelly said. “He asked me out, and the rest is history.”

The union between Kelly and Ralph Flagg brought together two of the best players in the history of Nokomis High School in Newport, Maine. Ralph, a 6-foot-9 center, played at Eastern Maine Community College. Kelly, a 5-foot-10 wing, co-captained the only University of Maine women’s team ever to win an NCAA tournament game, a 1999 upset of national power Stanford.

Kelly and Ralph settled in Newport, a close-knit town of 3,100 often hailed as the “Crossroads of Maine.” It’s a favorite pit stop for Interstate-95 travelers because it has gas stations, fast-food joints, a Walmart, an auto-parts store and an ice cream shop — “every single convenience you could ask for,” as one Maine radio DJ recently put it.

The two-story brown farmhouse where Kelly and Ralph raised their three boys had a basketball hoop on the left side of the driveway. Oldest brother Hunter and Cooper’s twin brother Ace took awhile getting into the sport. Cooper all but came out of the womb in high tops and a basketball jersey.

When playing rec-league ball against kids his own age no longer sufficiently challenged Cooper, Kelly sought to find a club program that could help her second grader continue to develop. She arranged a tryout with Black Bear North AAU, a nearby team whose players were all at least a year or two older than Cooper.

“It’s OK if you don’t make the team, buddy,” Kelly told Cooper beforehand, hoping to brace him for disappointment in case he didn’t make the cut.

The coach of the Black Bear North team was a former all-conference University of Maine guard with ambitions of coaching at a higher level someday. Kevin Reed went into Cooper’s tryout with no interest in weakening his team by getting younger.

“There’s a big difference between second graders and fourth graders,” Reed told Yahoo Sports. “I wanted to be competitive. I wanted kids on the older side, the stronger side.”

What happened next was the first hint that Cooper wasn’t like other kids. He didn’t just make the team. He was so tall, so competitive and so gifted that Reed kept wondering aloud, “Is he really in second grade?”

The way Reed describes it, Cooper was already “a mini-version of what we see him do now.” He defended relentlessly. He rebounded in traffic. He pushed the ball in transition. He looked to set up his teammates as often as he tried to score himself.

Cooper was the best player on the floor most games that season and seldom came out to rest. He’d be so exhausted after playing two or three games a day against older, stronger kids that his dad would carry him from the gym to the car.

“He was just a little bag of bones,” Kelly said.

One memory that remains vivid for Kelly is 8-year-old Cooper saving a ball that was going out of bounds, twisting in midair and whipping a one-handed pass to a teammate who scored a layup at the other end of the court.

“OK, that was a little different,” Kelly remembers thinking.

It wouldn’t be the last time someone would say that about Cooper.

Uh-oh, here comes Maine United

One of Maine’s basketball icons first heard rumblings about Cooper Flagg almost a decade ago.

Trusted friends kept telling Bedard that there was a third grader from central Maine who he needed to go see.

At first, Bedard was reluctant. He just wanted to coach his son Kaden, not poach kids from different AAU programs and form a super team. Bedard changed his mind when he found out that Cooper was playing up several age groups and that he was Kelly’s son. Kelly had played for the University of Maine at the same time that Bedard captained the men’s team to a school-record 24 victories, but they lost touch after college.

When Bedard walked into an AAU tournament and scanned each court, he didn’t need Kelly’s help finding her son.

“All of a sudden, I see this long, lanky kid who just moves different,” Bedard told Yahoo Sports with a chuckle. “I was like, ‘Yeah, that’s Cooper right there.’”

To Bedard, the question wasn’t whether to ask Cooper and Ace to join his team. It was whether Ralph and Kelly would be open to it. Bedard’s program was based in Portland, Maine, just over 100 miles south of Newport. That meant the Flaggs would have to drive an hour and a half to get Cooper and Ace to practice and an hour and a half to return home.

Ralph and Kelly chose to make that sacrifice because they trusted Bedard to put their sons on a path to a college scholarship. They appreciated the urgency of Bedard’s practices, his desire to seek out the strongest competition and his candor when telling players how they needed to improve.

Two or three weekday afternoons per week, the Flaggs would pile into their Chrysler minivan and journey down I-95 on their way to practices. Kelly often helped the boys pass the time by playing DVDs featuring full-game replays from the 1985-86 Boston Celtics’ playoff run or chronicling the rivalry between Larry Bird and Magic Johnson.

Bird’s obsessive work ethic and winning mentality became an inspiration to Cooper during those back-seat film sessions. To this day, Bird remains his favorite player.

“That’s really to me what Larry Bird encapsulates as a player,” Kelly said. “He did whatever the team needed him to do night in and night out. Cooper is the same way. He isn’t somebody who feels like doing the dirty work is beneath him.”

By the time Cooper was in middle school, Bedard and Kelly formed their own AAU program that attracted top players from across their home state. Maine United typically played in higher age divisions yet outclassed opponents across New England, causing Bedard and Kelly to travel farther in search of tougher competition and more national exposure.

An early barometer came against a New Jersey-based team that competed in the 14-and-under division but had players who could pass for college graduates. Some were as tall as 6-8 or 6-9 with tattoos and facial hair, the way Bedard remembers it.

When both teams were going through layup lines, Kelly noticed some of the opposing players sizing up Maine United and “kind of giggling a little bit.” Then the game started, Cooper set the tone with a couple powerful dunks and the laughter stopped. Said Kelly with a chuckle of her own, “We were up like 25-0 before they even knew what hit them.”

That performance helped brainwash nine boys from Maine into believing they could take down prestigious teams from basketball hotbeds.

Cooper, by then 6-foot-7 and no longer a “little bag of bones,” was Maine United’s headliner. He imposed his will with both five-star talent and skill and a role player’s hustle and grit. The rest of the team tried to emulate his work ethic and follow in his slipstream. They learned to recognize mismatches and create high-percentage shots on offense and to blitz ball screens and rotate like mad men on defense.

“Slowly, you started to see the shift where we became the alphas and the other teams were like, ‘Uh-oh, we’ve got to play Maine United?’” Kelly recalled.

As Maine United flourished, Cooper began ascending in age-group rankings and attracting attention from college coaches. The University of Maine staff couldn’t help but notice Cooper when the seventh grader showed up at the student recreation center with a basketball under his arm and put himself through a series of strenuous solo drills. Reed worked as a Maine assistant coach at the time and recalls marveling at his former second-grade pupil’s work ethic.

“The conversation came up among the coaching staff: Do you offer a seventh grader a scholarship?” Reed recalled. “I was like absolutely. You could already tell this kid was going to be special and he was from Maine. We don’t get these kids very often.”

While Maine hesitated, former Bryant University coach Jared Grasso did not. After watching Cooper lead Maine United to the championship of a prestigious tournament in Boston the summer after he completed eighth grade, Grasso became the first college coach to offer a scholarship.

“Between his movement, his athleticism and his feel, he probably could have come in and been an impact player for us right then,” Grasso told Yahoo Sports. “He was a unicorn. He was so gifted and so far ahead of his peers.”

Goodbye, Maine

Andy Bedard remembers when he realized that the basketball community in the state of Maine had only a faint idea of how supremely gifted Cooper was.

People would ask Bedard if he thought Cooper might play for Maine one day. Or if Cooper might be a better prospect than Bedard or Nik Caner-Medley. Even Cooper’s future high school coach, Earl Anderson, didn’t seem to fully grasp what he was getting.

“I was like, bud, you don’t even really understand,” Bedard said. “You’re going to be able to sit there and say, ‘Go get me 20 and I’ll be back with some popcorn.’”

Those in Maine finally got a long-awaited glimpse of Cooper’s talent when he and Ace enrolled at Nokomis High as freshmen in fall 2021. The twins had long ago set a goal of trying to win a state title alongside their older brother Hunter, a senior at Nokomis that year.

Compared to the waves of length and athleticism that Cooper regularly dealt with on the AAU circuit, the transition to Maine high school basketball was a breeze. He averaged a stat line unrealistic even for a video game: 20.5 points, 10 rebounds, 6.2 assists, 3.7 steals and 3.7 blocks per game.

The highlight ingrained in the mind of then-Nokomis assistant coach Josh Grant occurred during the opening possession of an early-season game against South Portland. Cooper closed out on a shooter two steps behind the arc on the right wing, then recovered not even three seconds later to reject another opposing player at the rim.

“Most players would have just conceded that layup,” Grant told Yahoo Sports. “They would never have put in the effort to be in position to block that shot.”

The buzz generated by Cooper grew with every blocked shot, deft assist and thunderous dunk. Thousands of fans came from all across Maine to watch Nokomis in the state playoffs, COVID restrictions be damned. Local business owners displayed signs in their windows urging Nokomis to “bring home that gold.”

When Cooper led Nokomis to its first boys basketball state title, all eight townships that feed into the school sent a convoy of police cars and fire trucks to escort the team bus back to campus. Revelers young and old lined both sides of the road, some celebrating by going bare-chested in the cold night air and waving their shirts over their heads.

The person who took the most pleasure in Nokomis’ state title run was the senior that Cooper and Ace displaced in the team’s starting five. Hunter told reporters at the time that the sacrifice was more than worth it and that teaming with his brothers meant “everything” to him.

“I’m never going to forget this experience,” he added.

Long before they checked off their goal of winning a state championship, Cooper and Ace had already accepted that their freshman season would be their last year of high school basketball in Maine. The twins had to leave their home state to find the top-tier competition they needed to maximize their potential.

The Florida prep school that the Flaggs chose has a reputation for preparing elite prospects for professional basketball. Montverde Academy has 16 players on NBA opening day rosters this season, more than the likes of UCLA, Kansas, Indiana and North Carolina.

It wasn’t easy for Ralph and Kelly not to be around their boys every day, so last year they made the difficult decision to leave their tight-knit community behind. They sold their farmhouse in Newport and moved to Florida full-time.

Since the Flaggs left Maine, Cooper’s celebrity status in his home state has only grown. Mainers watched with pride as one of their own entrenched himself as the No. 1 player in his class by making the U.S. U-17 World Cup team as a 15-year-old, leading that team to a gold medal and becoming USA Basketball’s youngest-ever male athlete of the year award winner.

In August 2023, Cooper reclassified from the class of 2025 to 2024, speeding up his NBA early-entry clock by a year. Two months later, he chose Duke over UConn and Kansas.

Pride turned to awe this past summer when Cooper was the only teenager selected to train with the U.S. men’s national team as it prepared for the Paris Olympics. The Duke signee looked totally at ease going against some of the NBA’s biggest superstars, hitting a flurry of impressive shots and drawing praise from the likes of LeBron James.

“It was another moment where we’re all looking at each other in the gym shaking our heads,” Mackenzie said. “Every time we put a challenge in front of this kid, he not only rises to the occasion, he blows it out of the water. At this point, nothing surprises me with him.”

When Cooper returned to Maine this past summer, he discovered an unintended side effect of his success: It was harder for him to go out in public without getting mobbed than it used to be. Autograph seekers waited for him at the clubhouse while he was finishing a round of golf. Curious kids peered through the window at Mackenzie’s gym to catch a glimpse of Cooper’s workouts.

“Kids in Maine are dreaming bigger because of him,” Grant said.

Those close to Cooper are impressed with how he has handled the responsibility of being a role model at age 17. They say he takes time to chat with Maine kids and pose for photos because it wasn’t that long ago he was in their shoes.

“There’s a lot of towns in Maine like Newport,” Bedard said, “a lot of kids playing basketball at their barn. So many kids are out there, last shot before they come in for dinner, Cooper Flagg for 3.”

It took a long time for Maine to produce its first Cooper Flagg. Maybe the wait for the next nationally renowned prospect won’t be so long.