Maurice Flowers is The Post’s 2024 Newsmaker of the Year

DONALD WATKINS | THE CHARLOTTE POST

Maurice Flowers, who coached Johnson C. Smith University’s football program unprecedented heights in three seasons,  is The Post’s 2024 Newsmaker of the Year. Flowers, a JCSU and East Mecklenburg High School graduate, coached the Golden Bulls to eight wins in 10 games, tying the school record last achieved in 1975. “To go to Johnson C. Smith, a place that hasn’t had many winning season, no good facilities, so many what would seem to be obstacles, we saw them as opportunity,” he said.

For a half-century, losing football was synonymous with Johnson C. Smith University.

But buried beneath the rubble of irrelevance, Maurice Flowers saw possibility, a chance to build a program capable of competing on bigger stages. Although he was leading a winning program at Fort Valley State University in Georgia, he leaped for a reclamation project.

Why? Homegrown possibilities.

“To go to Johnson C. Smith, a place that hasn’t had many winning seasons, no good facilities, so many what would seem to be obstacles, we saw them as opportunity,” said Flowers, The Post’s Newsmaker of the Year. “I think the turnaround that we had comes because we’re familiar with Johnson C. Smith, familiarity with Charlotte … It’s easy to see that the right person … is going to have some success and that’s what we’ve done.”

Flowers, who was hired in 2022, has been successful in three seasons at JCSU. In his first season, the Golden Bulls went 2-7 but six losses were by one possession or overtime. In 2023, the Golden Bulls went 7-4 and earned an invitation to the Florida Beach Bowl, a showcase between teams from the CIAA and SIAC, the nation’s Division II Black college conferences.

“I think it’s been great,” said Bill Dulin, a 1974 JCSU graduate who coached Flowers at East Mecklenburg High School. “It shows progress from Day One to right now because his first year he was 2-7, and then he went to 7-4 and this year 8-2. He’s continually making progress, and I don’t have any complaints at all in terms of that turnaround, that growth.”

For most of the 2024 season, Flowers and the Golden Bulls were the toast of HBCU football with a record-setting campaign that included a school-best 8-0 start, the program’s first national ranking that peaked at No. 16 and 10 players earning All-CIAA recognition, including six on the first team. Linebacker Benari Black, a West Charlotte High graduate, earned CIAA defensive player of the year.

“This really was a snowball that just started off small and then just got bigger and bigger and bigger,” said Flowers, who was named CIAA coach of the year by his peers. “As we’re in the middle of it, you could just feel the momentum going every practice, every game, and it was a great feeling to have and see. When we started this, we never started out to say, ‘hey, we want to have a win streak.’ We just wanted to get the best out of ourselves each day and then you look up and 2-0, 3-0 and 4-0. At no time did we stop and say, ‘Hey guys, you know, we can go undefeated.’ We just concentrated on the process.”

Donal Ware, founder of BoxToRow, a nationally syndicated radio program and weekly HBCU football poll, credits Flowers’ local ties and philosophy as essential to the Golden Bulls’ ascent.

“I wasn’t really surprised, to be honest with you, particularly with the way that Johnson C. Smith finished last year,” Ware said. It’s been a while since JCSU was really relevant, and then you can see in these last couple of years coach Flowers has made Johnson C. Smith relevant. He cares, he’s a Johnson C. Smith grad, he grew up in Charlotte, so it means a lot to him, and he’s going to go out and bring in the best players and [do] the best job he can.”

A long road to relevance

Over a 15-year stretch in the 1960s and ‘70s, JCSU was a force during a time when racial segregation limited options for Black athletes and coaches. With CIAA Hall of Fame inductee Eddie McGirt as head coach, the Golden Bulls won more games than they lost in nine of 10 seasons in the 1960s and earned the school’s first – and only – conference title in 1969. McGirt’s teams played in two of the first three CIAA title  games in 1970 and ’72 and several of his players went on NFL careers.

Desegregation of formerly white-only colleges in the South all but dried up the talent pool HBCUs relied on by McGirt’s 1977 retirement. Over the next 45 years, JCSU hired 11 head coaches – none managed a winning record as the program averaged 2.3 wins a season  – until Flowers’ appointment.

“I knew we can do better,” said Flowers, a Golden Bulls quarterback from 1987-90. “When I was a player and you’re in the midst of it, you don’t really know what makes great programs. What you think as a player is, ‘hey, I’m just gonna be out there and I’m good, and so everybody else is gonna be good, and we’re gonna beat everyone.’ But as you get out of college and then you start in the profession, you start to see what it takes to be a sustained winner.

“It does take a supportive administration; it does take good facilities. It takes the ability to be able to go and recruit top-flight football players and it takes a university that has a great degree system. What we have that many schools don’t have is we have the city of Charlotte that supports us. To get an education from Johnson C. Smith and to start the next phase of your life in Charlotte, North Carolina, you have so many advantages. We knew that this job had always been one that we thought could be a real successful program.”

‘You can’t halfway football’

Flowers’ formula for roster-building is straightforward: add as much local talent as possible. A 90-mile radius of Charlotte is JCSU’s focus, which includes South Carolina’s Upstate, where he once coached at Chester High School. That philosophy also applies to transfers, where Flowers recruited Charlotteans Quavaris Crouch (Michigan State), Ari Rodriguez (Navy) and Shemar Baker (UNC Charlotte) from upper-level Division I programs.

“We know that this area for high school football is a hotbed,” Flowers said. “Everyone in the country comes here to recruit athletes, and you add to that our coaching staff has experience coaching and recruiting in the state of Georgia, the state of Florida … top states in the country for football players. If you look at our roster, what you see is a makeup of football players that come from hotbeds [for] high school football.”

One of them, Darius Ocean, went from a backup quarterback at Western Kentucky and Valdosta State to an All-CIAA pick after passing for a JCSU record 2,301 yards and 16 touchdowns in 2024. Flowers’ pitch to the Hough High alumnus was straightforward: JCSU represents opportunity.

“When I had my visit here, I just loved what Coach Flo was just talking about, and then you can see the progression of the team,” Ocean said in October. “When he first got here, they weren’t that good and you can see the second year, they got a better record. You can see everything was just like the way he put it to me. I could just see the vision that he had.”

To build a more competitive program, Flowers convinced JCSU administrators to invest in athletic infrastructure. The school replaced Eddie McGirt Field’s grass playing surface with state-of-the-art Field Turf and built a performance center for all athletes. It also funds the equivalent of 36 scholarships for football – the maximum allowed in Division II. The budget for full-time coaches was increased. The results are reflected in the win column.

“To be a successful football program, the university has to be all the way bought in,” Flowers said. “You can’t halfway football. There’s no Cinderellas in football. You don’t sneak up on folks in football most of the time, because there’s so many areas that have to be supported. You can’t compete for championships if you only have four- to five full-time coaches when you’re going to be competing against [teams] in the conference that have eight, nine, 10. You can’t compete on a regular basis if you’re not able to bring in good football players.”

Attention at home and beyond

JCSU’s 7-4 record in 2023 drew the attention of CIAA rivals, who voted the Golden Bulls fourth in the preseason coaches’ poll behind perennial powers Virginia State, Virginia Union and Fayetteville State universities.

Beating Virginia Union 21-16 in the season’s fourth game confirmed JCSU as a contender for the CIAA title. Before that, the Golden Bulls were a curiosity who beat Tuskegee (Ala.), a perennial SIAC power and blew out Lincoln (Pa.) and Bluefield State (W.Va.), a pair of struggling CIAA programs.

Virginia Union, which went on to win its second straight CIAA title in 2024, was a test of their growth.

JCSU led  start to finish.

HERBERT L. WHITE | THE CHARLOTTE POST

Johnson C. Smith University football coach Maurice Flowers encouraged school leaders to invest in athletics, which helps with recruiting. “To be a successful football program, the university has to be all the way bought in,” he said. “You can’t halfway football. There’s no Cinderellas in football. You don't sneak up on folks in football most of the time, because there's so many areas that have to be supported.”

“The win against Virginia Union” was confirmation, Ware said. “You’re talking about the defending champs, and you took them out. … I thought JCSU would be solid coming into the season because of what they did last year but then you get the win against Virginia Union. To me, that was where I was like, ‘you know, the Golden Bulls are going to be serious contenders for the CIAA championship.’”

In addition to the Virginia Union win, JCSU also beat Virginia State and Winston-Salem State for the second straight year, which last happened in 1975-76. At 8-0, the Golden Bulls were a hot commodity. Home games that typically drew one reporter suddenly required postgame media availability. There were two national television broadcasts, including one on ESPN for the first time.

“We were getting interview requests from the Sacramento Bee in California,” Flowers said. “It just [shows] that Johnson C. Smith University is making a nationwide impact. You don’t set out to do those things. We were setting out to be better than we were the day before, then you look up and we’re on (ESPN’s) ‘College Game Day’ three times. That doesn’t happen for Division II programs. Just a great experience all the way around.”

The increased media coverage coincided with a larger following for games. The homecoming contest against Shaw University drew 5,387 fans to 4,500-capacity McGirt Field while hundreds more watched outside the stadium fence. JCSU supporters from across the Southeast chartered buses for a September game against Morehouse College in Atlanta. They outnumbered Maroon Tigers fans.

“For a long time, you could go to a Smith game and just about name everybody that was there,” said Dulin, who played for McGirt and briefly with the NFL’s Dallas Cowboys. “I know that sounds uncanny, but now you got people coming back to the games, and it just creates a new aura, and it does good for the university.

“For a lot of people, their first exposure to a university is how well the football team is doing, because that’s what they see right off the bat in August, and that resonates. Then they begin to … get more information about the school, so not only does it do good for athletics, it does good for the entire environment surrounding Smith.”

Unfinished business

For all their success in 2024, JCSU fumbled away its postseason opportunities with losses to Fayetteville State and rival Livingstone College in their final two games. Those setbacks taught valuable lessons for a program unaccustomed to prominence.

“It’s going to do us a lot of good, having [gone] through these things to propel us to having even better things happen in the future,” Flowers said. “Being a part of this and just feeling the momentum, feeling the city of Charlotte, feeling our alumni base from all over the country.”

Said Ware: “I would expect them to learn the lessons from the last two games of this season. I don’t think the program falls off, because you may lose some guys to the portal, but it allows you to get some guys back. You still have to incorporate them into the type of culture that you have but I think that [winning at JCSU] means so much to him … and it’s tasted success the last couple of years that we will be talking about Johnson C. Smith in the CIAA championship game.”

Flowers, who took responsibility for the late-season collapse, said that experience motivates him.

“A lot of times, some of the toughest things that we’ll have to do in life is look in that mirror and see what we see in that mirror,” he said. “We have to look in that mirror and see where to do the tough work and that tough work is saying I might have made some mistakes. I did make some mistakes. What we did well, how can we make it better? That’s the work that has to be done, that’s the work that is being done, and that’s the work that’s going to propel us to be better in ‘25.”

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