Cooper Flagg's mom Kelly reveals the secret to raising a generational talent

Kelly Flagg isn't your typical sports mom.

Well, actually, in a lot of ways, she is.

Flagg is known for passionately supporting her three sons — Hunter, Ace and Cooper (she and her husband, Ralph, are also mom and dad to Ryder, Hunter's twin brother, who died soon after birth) — through all of their pursuits. The thing about the Flagg family is that those pursuits have included the toughest the sport of basketball has to offer.

At this point, anyone who watches the NBA knows who Cooper Flagg is. At 6-9, he's been turning heads for most of his life, and by the time the Mavericks drafted him as the No. 1 overall pick in the NBA Draft this year, he was already well on his way to global athletic domination without having yet played an actual NBA game. 

But Cooper isn't the only member of the Flagg family who's good at basketball. Hunter played until his path deviated (he's a "retired athlete," Kelly jokes) and Ace will play for the University of Maine this fall. Kelly and Ralph were also hoopers, something that made it easy to instill a love for the game into each of their kids.

Maybe it's a result of raising so many tall, rambling boys for a huge portion of her life, but Kelly is remarkably easy to speak to. She explained via Zoom that she's always been "superstitious" when it comes to her sons and their basketball games — so Dallas fans shouldn't be surprised if they find her insisting on returning to the same seats in the American Airlines Center for each of her sons' games this upcoming season.

After all, it's a family tradition.

"I have a lot of superstitions around basketball and the games, especially at Montverde [the high school where both Cooper and Ace played]," Kelly said. "I had a specific seat I had to sit in [there] and then again at Duke. They put us in the same seats the first few games, and then they moved us, and Cooper didn't have his best game, and I said, 'Don't ever do that again. Put me back.'"

"So then from then on I had to sit in the exact seat and they always gave me those tickets. So that was good," she laughed.

Though she doesn't know where she and Ralph will be seated in Dallas — yet — "hopefully where they put us brings good energy."

COOPER FLAGG FAMILY TREE: Meet twin brother Ace, parents and more about Duke star's Maine roots

(Jerome Miron)

Raising a family of athletes isn't for the faint of heart

While reflecting on raising her sons, Kelly admitted that though raising three athletes could be chaotic at times, it helped that Cooper and Ace were on the same track until Cooper's last year of high school, when he opted to graduate early to move up with a specific draft class.

That decision was deliberate, and something the teenager arrived at after a lot of careful thought. It also required a lot of extra work from him that not every teen might be up to.

Cooper spent the summer before what became his senior year cramming. In addition to basketball practice and training, he took an English class and an elective to make sure he could graduate in 2025 instead of 2026. Cooper, who also boasted a 4.2 GPA, handled the pressure well.

"And, you know, that's how he is when he puts his mind to something," Kelly explained. "He's task-oriented and he gets it done."

MORE: Cooper Flagg’s mom reacts to NBA Summer League moment with Knueppel

A lot of attention has been paid to an obvious fact: Cooper and Ace are twins and both play basketball, but only one of them is playing at such an astronomical level. This raises natural questions and curiosities about the dynamic in the family's home: how did Kelly and Ralph handle making sure both their sons felt supported and secure, especially as Cooper's path toward the NBA began to become increasingly clear?

It turns out that with focus and love, a lot is made possible.

"I've always been very intentional about parenting them as individual people who just happen to be born at the same time. I mean, they don't even look alike. So that is a little bit easier," Kelly began with a laugh.

"But their personalities are also very different, even though they're both driven as far as sports and love the competition of it. Their approach to, you know, everything from their day-to-day lives and who they are is different. And so we just were intentional about how we parented that."

Cooper, she added, "was ready to be pushed in that way" and "Ace is on his own path and his own journey and his own timeline."

"He's also very talented and does very well. He is just not the same as his brother."

And really, who is? That's a reality that not only sets Cooper apart from his brothers but also from his future colleagues in the NBA.

Cooper's defensive prowess is already impressive for an athlete who is a year younger than everyone else in his class, and by all appearances, he's humble and polite — unless you're an opponent on the court. But once the game is over, you don't hear much about Cooper putting himself in positions that could cause problems for himself, his family or the game he loves.

That's a credit to Kelly and Ralph, who have recently made a decision that will pull the family apart in a new way — but there's no doubt that they will navigate together.

MORE: Mavericks rookie Cooper Flagg given surprising Summer League grade

What's next for the Flagg family

While mid-conversation with The Sporting News, Kelly revealed she was actually in the family's new home in Dallas — literally mid-move.

"We just got a place in Dallas. That will be our full-time address for now," Kelly said. "And we have a place back in Maine as well. So we will definitely be splitting [time] between the two locations more so once the basketball season gets underway, we'll spend more time, you know, in Maine when we can."

Kelly added that despite the upheaval that such a move can bring with it, she felt more than prepared thanks to a partnership with Dr. Scholl's.

Kelly doesn't do a lot of partnerships — her focus is nearly always on her sons — but this one spoke to her because of its emphasis on sports moms. As she put it, the brand's 24-Hour Energy Multipurpose Insoles really work and genuinely impact her quality of life while navigating flights, coordinating moving trucks and walking around her new home, trying to figure out just where everything needs to go. 

"If it wasn't for [the insoles], I would not have survived the day!" Kelly emphasized. "Because I was on my feet, the movers came, I was directing them."

After the movers left the family's former home in Florida, Kelly had to clean the house and then head to the airport.

"I was so tired. But the only reason that I was still able to stand was because of my Dr. Scholl's."

Working with the brand has meant a lot to her, Kelly added, because of the respect they have for other moms just like her, those who are doing it all: navigating pick-up, drop-off, washing laundry, buying shoes for kids' feet that inexplicably keep growing, dashing from one child's game to another and, of course, making sure they stay locked in and are seated in their lucky seats.

It's a tall order, but Kelly — and the rest of the Flagg family — is built for it.

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