Melvin Flowers doesn’t play games while coaching the games, working in Macon on helping any kids who need it
Photo: Michael A. Lough/Central Georgia Sports Report
By Michael A. Lough
The Sports Report
centralgasports@gmail.com
Early on, Melvin Flowers did more watching.
He always liked sports, and throughout high school at Northeast, he was around the likes of Alvin Copeland and Walter Johnson, two of Bibb County’s top coaches of the last half-century.
Yet Flowers didn’t put on the uniform of any teams at Northeast. He went to Morehouse, didn’t play anything there, and some family issues led to an early end to his college days.
So here Flowers sits, in the lobby of the Frank Johnson Community Center at the corner of Pio Nono and Mercer, 38 years of coaching basketball under his belt.
He’s among the unsung soldiers on the front lines of the battle to save, or at least try to, city kids who like basketball and may be looking for a better life.
Working with the legendary Duck
Flowers has been walking the halls and rooms and gym at Frank Johnson since the early 1980s, organizing softball as well as basketball. Flowers, who spent several years as a nearly full-time substitute teacher in Bibb County, began spending some time with Southwest basketball coaching legend Don Richardson.
“I started coaching when I was watching Don Richardson,” Flowers said. “I got a thing in me. I used to love to watch him coach, watch the kids participate.”
From 1982-89, Flowers ran a rec league basketball team at Johnson, and his connection with Richardson helped.
“People he didn’t want, I’d get,” Flowers said. “You could make another good high school team with the talent they had at Southwest.”
Richardson and Isaac Lightfoot, another basketball coach stalwart in the area, told him to start an AAU team in Macon if he really wanted to get into coaching.
So in 1990, the Westside Bucks were born. They became the Middle Georgia Bucks, and remained that way until 2020 when he changed it to the Georgia Suns.
Officially, it’s the Georgia Suns Youth Empowerment Program. Because, well, it’s about more than just basketball, and more than coaching: Babysitter, guidance counselor, bus driver, advisor, grandfather.
“You’re everything,” he said. “When you're working with kids, you have to be dad, mom, aunt, grandad, everybody. They’re babies, and they act like babies.
“We try pull youth and keep them out of trouble. We try to bring people here to instruct them, (that) life is better than wanting to be around here with a gun in your pocket killing up on each other.”
The preseason speech remains mostly the same as the players change.
“Your expectations, what I expect out of you when you're here,” he said. “One of the things I strongly believe in is going to school and taking care of your work, doing your lessons. That's what this program is all about, trying to get you to be a young man, first of all, be successful in school, do the necessary things you need to do in school to go to that next level. If you don't do that ...
“They've got to understand if you're going to go to that next level, if you don't have school, if you don't do the necessary work in school, you're not gonna go D-I. Everybody wants to go D-I, but don't have D-I grades. Some of ‘em don't have D-II grades.”
The task gets tougher and tougher
There used to be more parental support, something that’s now all but non-existent.
“Back then, parents used to help with a lot of things,” Flowers said. “Now, a lot of parents don't. It depends on the environment, where they're from. Most kids back then, parents sacrificed and did what they had to do. Now, you have to take the load on your own and get somebody to help you.
“In 2006, when we went undefeated, won the national championship, we had the gym full of parents. They'd come sit in the bleachers and watch practice.”
Even assistance for just basketball is a struggle and gamble. Flowers is pretty much running things solo, reluctantly by choice.
The banners cover decades.
Video: Michael A. Lough/Central Georgia Sports Report
“I could get people. but you have to have accountable people,” he said. “You can't have people come here starting in for a few weeks, then you won't see 'em again.”
There used to be more basketball, too, to go with support and help back in the day.
“Back then, you had more kids more humble, wanted to practice, was on time, were dedicated and loving what they do,” he said. “It was Xs and Os back then. It's a totally different environment. Seven-footers played in the paint. now you got 6-7 running the ball up the court. They don't want to play that (in the paint). If you're 6-6, 6-7 now, that's an average size for a guard.”
The banner for the 2006 AAU national championship team hangs in the middle of the gym, and just looking at it brings a smile.
“It was amazing how talented they were,” Flowers said. “I didn't have to coach. They knew the game, and they knew what to do. It was all about winning. All about winning. Any day they stepped foot on the court, it was all about winning. 'Coach, we gonna win today, let me handle it.'”
That team went 33-0, including winning the Hoosier Showcase.
“The guy told me, ‘Y'all got to be good. Nobody comes in to Indiana and beats the Hoosiers in that showcase,’” Flowers remembered.
The majority of that team was made up of players from outside of Macon, which is a sign of the program’s reputation. A few years ago, players came from Lee County, Statesboro, and Tift County as well as some from Central Georgia. This year’s team covers Columbus, Atlanta, Valdosta, Albany, with Putnam County High giving it some Central Georgia flavor.
“Most of my players are spread out,” Flower said. “If i can get a kid from Lee County all the way to Macon, Georgia, you know we got a good program.
“A lot of parents love our program.”
Still, it frustrates Flowers, who would naturally like more local kids, if they wanted to do things right, basketball and otherwise.
“My problem in Macon is the youth,” he said. “They're right here, and they don't want to come to practice, you know what I'm saying? They're not energized like they have been in the past, the kids in Macon. Not many of 'em.”
The changing landscape of offseason basketball
About a decade ago, as social media became of a greater impact in the lives of teens, priorities changed with players, and it was more about exposure – many camps are now called “exposure camps” and playing winning basketball isn’t quite the goal – than winning.
“We work 'em out, and they see the difference with my coaching, because I go fundamentals,” Flowers said. “I teach old-school how to play, not just this getting out there and playing this new ball.
“You got centers that wanna be point guards. They wanna go out there and run up and down the court. In college, (with) 6-8 point guards, they have that. But we don't need you to do that, and you don't need to do it.”
Along the way, offseason basketball has exploded beyond AAU – which is a fraction of its former self - with dozens of outlets selling exposure, selling camps, selling “tournaments” with promises of college coaches and media exposure, the latter of which is ostensibly mostly tweeting about those who have paid to participate.
As social media grew, the desire for attention grew, and slowly, work ethic and basketball IQs began decreasing.
Flowers combines the old days of wanting to win with the reality of today’s world – real and basketball – and that other priorities have taken over.
“What we do now, the record means nothing,” he said. “It's all about exposure basketball, kids getting screened, coaches seeing 'em, NCAA live periods.”
Less basketball, more life and death
Flowers’ memory is tested by time, age, life, and the daily overseeing of kids running through the center as well as the yearly turnover on his team. And the past few years have been substantially more trying.
He got COVID-19 – for the first time - only a few months after the pandemic started in 2020.
“It really was a risk every time I went out there,” he said late that summer. “I was just blessed this particular time that the Lord gave me another chance. It didn't take me out. No matter how strong you are, it'll take you out.”
It kept him from taking the team to a tournament in Suwanee in mid July of 2020. He was in the office during the recovery process when O.J. Reese, one of four players from Statesboro on the team, stopped by before leaving for the event.
“He came in, knocked on the door, he was just smiling,” Flowers said. “ ‘You don't see something different about me?' I couldn't understand what he was talking about. I wear white (Nike) Forces. I didn't look at his shoes, but he had the whitest Forces I'd ever seen in my life. New Nike shoes, in white.
“He smiled. 'I said, ‘Oh man, you got you some new shoes.' There was just something about that smile that day. I just remember him smiling going out that door.
“I never thought in my last days of living that he would be dead several hours later that day.”
Reese collapsed on the court during a game and died shortly afterward. Flowers was en route when the second call came.
Read. Enjoy. Share/retweet. Tell a friend. Come back every day.
“They didn’t know he had a heart problem,” Flowers said. “They said he never complained about anything. … I just couldn't believe it. I couldn't believe that kid passed. Wonderful kid. He was wonderful.”
The gun life has aged him even more. A few years earlier, in October of 2017, 16-year-old Jayvon Sherman was shot and killed near Pio Nono and Beech, less than a mile from the center. The high school junior was shot and killed, by a 19-year-old gang member arrested two weeks later and convicted two years later, now serving a life sentence.
Last summer, Flowers’ 16-year-old nephew Hakeem was shot and killed by a 29-year-old acquaintance. And 10 months later, Flowers older brother suffered the same fate, under different circumstances.
Flowers’ face and voice grow tired.
“Last year, I was helping my nephew,” Flowers said. “He was a good kid. He got involved … I ain't gonna say he was on drugs, I speculated he was. He felt like he knew the streets, but evidently he didn't. A 30 year old guy shot him. They (hung out) together, I was told later. He killed him. Somebody that used to come by and pick him up.”
Donmeico Flowers was killed in April, a victim of being in the wrong place at the wrong time, involved in nothing unsavory or risky.
The current worries are more prevalent and more serious than a decade or so ago.
“You have so much gun violence,” he said. “With this gun violence going on now, we're trying to do everything necessary to keep them off the streets, teach them to be something in life. It's actually getting worse. Every city's having this problem. It's terrible.”
Still plugging
He still plugs along with that old-school outlook, though. Take one recent afternoon, when a couple teen agers were in the gym shooting around. Rather, working on dunks more than anything. Flowers arrived, and it was time to drill. They pulled out a training apparatus from Vertamax, an on-the-floor platform called the Raptor.
Working out involves more than just dribbling and shooting.
Video: Michael A. Lough/Central Georgia Sports Report
It has a trampoline-like middle, with a variety of cables to hook up to a player, assorted drills intended to improve leg strength and flexibility. While Gannon Harris, a rising senior from Smith Station, Ala. on the Suns, set it up and a few small kids shot around on the other side of the court, a friend of Harris’ in Macon not on the team but working out anyway, grabbed a ball to get a shot off, only for Flowers to scold him that it wasn’t time to be messing with the ball.
They spent awhile conditioning. No dribbling or shooting, or dunking. With Flowers constantly reminding them of the importance of endurance and legs.
A week later, Harris was on a recruiting trip to Maryland, with perhaps Kentucky on the horizon.
“Coach makes sure you do the right thing,” Harris said. “He don't care about anything materialistic. He does everything that's right for us. It feels like home, so I say it's the best place for me. It ain't for everybody, though.”
How much is his clock ticking?
Flowers talks about retirement only sporadically, no doubt more on days when the back is acting up or some young ‘n isn’t taking care of business or there’s not a parent around for a practice or game.
“It's getting close, I can feel it,” he said. “The reason I say it's getting close is because kids done changed. I'm an old-school coach, and the old-school part, nothing like it used to be. You tell 'em to do this, they do it their way. Defense, you almost have to go out there and fight.”
But two things, two people, so to speak, keep him going.
One is Beverly Olson. One of the state’s more generous benefactors has been a sponsor of the team for about two decades, and the mention of her name quickly and strongly counters the weariness in Flowers’ face and voice of other topics.
“Oohh, Lord, that’s just an angel in the sky,” Flowers said. “She's a sweet, wonderful ... I can't name the words for her. She's just wonderful. She don't like to be complimented much.
“She's like a relative to me. She's like a backbone to me. She gets on me when I'm not doing right. She's just a special person. I appreciate what she does, not just for me, but for so many other people. She's just a God-given angel.”
When Flowers battled COVID, Olson dropped off food on his porch.
“Too many people just ain’t gonna have time to help you,” he said.
It’s a unique coupling. Flowers is a born and bred Maconite, who has spent his adult life working with city kids, or somewhat rural kids with city experiences and outlooks, and has never been married. Olson, a Florida native, is a member of the Knight newspaper family, part of Knight Ridder, once the second-largest newspaper company in the nation, married for decades, business owner, mother to a business owner (son Charles is a Macon Mayhem co-owner as well as general manager of the 1842 Inn on College Street), and benefactor covering a broad spectrum.
How in the world did they come together? Neither remembers any details, unsurprising considering it was 20 or so years ago and they both maintain overflowing plates. But it was at some function, they were introduced, and Flowers talked about what he does.
“It was immediate,” said Olson, a proponent of naming the court at Frank Johnson after Flowers, of the connection. “I've always wanted to reach into the Black community. You've got to reach people, you've got to work with them. Here he was, presenting the fact that he worked with young people.
“He was the perfect person. He had the people I was trying to reach: keeping kids off the streets and doing something productive, and possible getting a scholarship.”
Olson also sponsors a city track team run by Jerome Hutchins, the Macon Striders Track Club. Fitting, because Flowers and Hutchins pretty much grew up together.
The ride has been stressful, exhilarating, tiring, painful, and rewarding, and isn't over yet.
Video: Michael A. Lough/Central Georgia Sports Report
“They’re just trying,” Olson said of the pair.
And then there are the 16- and 17-year-olds Flowers hasn’t met yet, the future incarnations of the past players he’s worked with, worked on, worked for, the youngsters who need that dad, mom, aunt, granddad, everybody, somebody to sell basketball and life, not in that order.
“I still have the feel as a coach,” he said. “I want to save more kids than anything, because I love working with ‘em. I want to do what I can to save as many as I can. Some of 'em are getting out there and killing each other.
“I’m just gonna be here to help ‘em as long as I can.”