When UMaine visited Duke earlier this season, Duke won the game and Newport native Cooper Flagg put up 18 points, including the two from this dunk. Photo courtesy of AP Photo/Ben McKeown
By Joel Crabtree
From our March 2025 issue
The bar at the Somerset Pour House was bustling on a Saturday afternoon this winter. The lone server juggled drink and food orders, bantered with regulars, and seemed to know everyone’s usual by heart. At a high top, a few people were playing cards. A couple of others were shooting pool. Framed jerseys of Boston sports legends, including Larry Bird’s number 33 and David Ortiz’s number 34, hung on the walls.
“What’s going on today?” one patron asked another as they waited for another round of drinks.
“Duke,” the other said, gesturing to one of the dozen or so televisions around the place.
Historically, the broadcast of a Duke University basketball game was not a big draw in the Somerset County town of Palmyra, population 1,500, about 800 miles away from the North Carolina school. This year, though, is different, and the reason has to do with a jersey displayed at the end of the bar: Nokomis Regional High’s number 32. That’s what Cooper Flagg wore when, as a freshman, he — along with his twin brother, Ace — led the boys’ basketball team to its first-ever state championship.
Flagg, from neighboring Newport (Nokomis Regional pulls from Palmyra, Newport, and several other towns), is now in his first season at Duke, one of college basketball’s perennial powerhouses. This month, he’ll be looking to help secure the school’s sixth NCAA title, and early results suggest he’s up to the task: in January, he set the Atlantic Coast Conference record for single-game points by a freshman, with 42 against Notre Dame, and the Duke team was enjoying a weeks-long run ranked in the top 10 of national polls.
“I don’t think we had many Duke basketball fans before, but now you see everybody wearing Duke basketball stuff,” says Earl Anderson, a former history teacher who coached Nokomis during its championship run with Flagg. “It brings great pride, because both sides of his family have deep, deep roots in Newport.” Flagg’s parents, Ralph and Kelly, played basketball at Nokomis. Ralph then joined the team at Eastern Maine Community College, and Kelly carved out a key role on the first-ever University of Maine women’s team to advance past the first round of the NCAA tournament.
“I’ve known Cooper his whole life,” says Josh Grant, who coached the Flagg twins both in middle school and, as an assistant, in high school. “You could tell early on, like in second grade, that he saw the game differently than kids who were that age. He held his own physically and competitively against much older kids even then.”
As the Flagg twins were finishing middle school, national media outlets started ranking them as two of the country’s top prospects in the high-school class of 2025. Their time at Nokomis, consequently, was cut short, as both were recruited to Montverde Academy, a prep school in Florida whose alumni include first-overall NBA draft picks and NBA all-stars. After two seasons at Montverde, at 17 years old, Flagg enrolled at Duke. In the summer leading up to his first college season, he made some highlight-reel plays in a scrimmage against the US Olympic squad that went on to win gold. (Ace, meanwhile, has committed to playing at University of Maine next season.) Flagg’s first season of college basketball will likely be his last. He’s widely expected to be the top pick at the NBA draft in a few months.
One recent afternoon, back at the gymnasium where Flagg cut his teeth, the Nokomis Warriors were running drills to help them figure out how to move better when they don’t have the ball, something they needed to improve on after a tough loss to the Messalonskee Eagles a few nights earlier. This year’s team has a lot of players who are new to varsity, and although they got off to a bit of a slow start, Grant, who took over as head coach after Anderson retired, wasn’t worried. They’re about where he expected in this post-Flagg era. “It’s still surreal to think that he could be on our team now as a senior in high school, and he’s playing at Duke,” Grant said. “He would’ve dominated the state of Maine. He would’ve dominated for four years. But it wouldn’t have helped him develop.”
Some of Flagg’s teammates from the 2022 championship are in their senior season at Nokomis. One of them is Dawson Townsend, who grew up with Flagg. Their families are close — Flagg’s and Townsend’s mothers played basketball together back in the ’90s — and Townsend has traveled down to watch a couple of games at Duke this season. When the Flagg twins are home, they all try to get together for a round of golf.
Those golf outings will get even harder to coordinate once Flagg joins an NBA team, but Townsend thinks they’ll still find time. “It’s hard to look at him like a celebrity, which he is, obviously,” Townsend says. “We’re friends, we’ve always been friends, and I kind of expect that to continue.”
Update: On Monday, April 21, Flagg announced on Instagram that he will leave Duke to enter the 2025 NBA draft in June.
