BLOOMINGTON, Ind. — The culture shock hit Bruiser Flint as he drove through Indiana from Philadelphia for the first time in the spring of 2017.
He had previously flown into Bloomington as a candidate for an assistant coaching position at Indiana, but traveling by car from the East Coast gave him an up-close look at the rolling countryside and the farms and hamlets that line Interstate 70 and Route 37 on the way to IU.
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It was then that he realized he was not in Philly anymore.
“I’m like, ‘I’m in the sticks a little bit,’” Flint says, cackling with his trademark raspiness. “You know what I mean? I was like, ‘Oh, man. I’m back on a true college campus now. There’ll be no catching the subway to work in the snow.’ Yo, man. Like, there’s corn fields. Horses.”
It’s not as if he hadn’t seen such scenery before. It had just been a while. He’d spent 15 years as the coach at Drexel, five minutes from the Philadelphia neighborhood he grew up in and not far from where he played his college ball at St. Joseph’s. Drexel was urban through and through, located in the central Philadelphia University City neighborhood just north of the University of Pennsylvania and west of the 30th Street train station.
But Flint says Bloomington reminded him of Amherst, the western Massachusetts town where he helped UMass take its brief turn as a national powerhouse and helped propel John Calipari’s career into hyperdrive.
Between his time working for Calipari and the day he agreed to join Archie Miller’s staff at Indiana, Flint spent 20 years running his own programs — first at UMass as Calipari’s successor, then at Drexel. He won a combined 331 games at those two spots, making two NCAA Tournament and six NIT appearances and establishing himself as one of the more beloved members of the college basketball coaching fraternity. But that wasn’t enough for him to avoid the axe at either school. And in 2016, at the age of 50, he was out of coaching for the first time since he graduated from St. Joe’s in 1987.
On the advice of coaching friends who’d lost their jobs at one time or another, he took a year off to work as an analyst for CBS Sports, attend practices and decide whether he wanted to get back in the profession.
He decided that he had to get back in — even if it meant leaving his beloved Philly. Even if it meant working for someone for the first time since he was 31. Even if that someone was young enough for Flint to have recruited him out of high school.
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That’s why he agreed to join the staff at Indiana when Miller took over following the firing of Tom Crean. The move took Flint away from the East Coast for the first time in his career, but he was in a Power 5 conference and with a blue-blood program for the first time as well. At Indiana, there is more fan interest, better facilities, more resources, more tradition and better access to high-level players than anywhere he’d previously worked.
“You’re talking about one of the best jobs,” Flint says, “one of the most historical jobs in college basketball.”
Now in his second season with the Hoosiers, Flint has been given a chance to reboot his career in a place where he can expand his base of recruiting contacts, reconsider his schematic philosophies and keep his name in the minds of athletic directors who will be looking for a head coach in the coming years.
And for as long as he’s in Bloomington, the Hoosiers get to benefit from the grit he brought from Philadelphia.
James Flint Jr. got his nickname from his grandfather, not because of his playing style but to ease the minds of his parents, who were concerned with whether their baby would ever come home.
“I was in the hospital for six weeks with some intestinal type of disease,” Flint says. “My grandfather said, ‘Don’t worry. He’s going to grow up to be a bruiser.'”
The toughness came from his father.
James Flint Sr. was a graphic artist by day, but he also worked at the Sherwood Recreation Center about three miles southwest of Drexel. He coached basketball teams there and also helped run the Sonny Hill Community Involvement Basketball League, the expansive Philadelphia basketball organization that ran summer leagues for age groups from elementary to high school and college-aged players. The league attracted the top talent in the city.
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Flint Sr. was notoriously demanding of even his youngest players — and demonstrative in ways that neither his son nor his former teammates could imagine him getting away with today.
“His dad was the first person I ever met that whole sentences were curse words,” says St. Joseph’s assistant coach Geoff Arnold, Flint’s friend since junior high school, teammate at St. Joe’s and assistant coach for 11 years at UMass and Drexel. “The noun, the pronoun, the verb, the adjective, everything was in its perfect place, but they were all curse words. Every single word.”
When Bruiser was playing for the Police Athletic League city championship with the 12-14 age group, his father got on him so hard that a bystander asked him why he put up with it.
“The janitor at the gym said, ‘Man, how do you play for that guy?'” Bruiser recalls. “I said, ‘Yo, that’s my dad.'”
But he understood why his father was so hard on him. Though Bruiser attended Episcopal Academy, a well-funded private school, the family lived in a rough-and-tumble Philadelphia neighborhood where drugs and violence were rampant. So, Bruiser needed to have the fortitude to survive that and to be able to hang in the other tough neighborhoods where he would play pickup games.
“You better be tough,” he says. “Things were different than they are now. We used to go to different neighborhoods and play, and we went to some tough places and you were just hoping to get out of there when the game was over.”
Bruiser also noticed that no matter how hard his father was on his other players, they kept in touch with him long after he coached them. The reason for that, he learned, was that his father proved time and again that he sincerely cared about the kids as more than basketball players, talking them through family issues and making sure they were keeping their grades up so they could attend college. It was a lesson Bruiser carried with him.
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“Everybody loved my dad,” he says. “As tough as he could be on them, he did things for them off the court. I always felt that with my dad, when the basketball was over, the basketball was over. That’s why guys loved my dad. That’s the biggest thing I took from my dad is he really cared about you, not just the basketball.”
Bruiser developed into an all-conference and third-team all-state player at Episcopal, and he graduated in 1983. He spent four years in the rotation at St. Joe’s, won the starting job as a senior when, helped by the introduction of the 3-point line, he averaged 14.6 points, 6.1 assists and 2.1 steals per game.
But because he was under 6-foot, he knew he didn’t have a future in the NBA. He had no interest in going overseas, so he was comfortable with moving on from basketball. As a financial management major, he planned on pursuing a career in that field. He had, however, been helping his father coach in summer leagues, and when Jim Foster — then the women’s basketball coach at St. Joe’s (and now the women’s coach at Chattanooga) — suggested to Bruiser that he get into coaching, he changed plans. His father helped him get a job as an assistant for Fang Mitchell at Coppin State. And at 22, Bruiser set out to follow his dad’s example.
His big move came two years later. After helping Mitchell’s Coppin State teams go from eight wins in the year before he arrived to 18 in his second season, Flint made enough connections at the Five-Star basketball camp outside Pittsburgh to catch Calipari’s eye. It was 1989. Calipari was 30 and in his second season at Massachusetts, and he decided Flint would be a good fit on one of the youngest and more ambitious coaching staffs in the country.
That staff turned a program that had gone 11 years without a winning season before Calipari’s arrival into one of the most successful teams in the country. The Minutemen hadn’t been to the NCAA Tournament since 1962, but they made it in each of Calipari’s last five seasons. They reached the Sweet 16 in 1992, the Elite Eight in 1995 and the Final Four in 1996, spending much of that season ranked No. 1 and finishing 35-2.
Flint’s fingerprints were all over the program.
“What he brings to the table is a consistency,” Calipari says. “He comes every day. He has the same smile on his face. He’s somebody that I don’t care where you’re from or who you are within the university or outside the university, you’re going to meet him and say, ‘Boy, I really like that guy.’”
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With his engaging personality, Flint has always been a natural as a recruiter. He had a part in recruiting Marcus Camby, the 1996 recipient of the Wooden and Naismith awards, and he was even more influential in bringing in much of his supporting cast, including guards Edgar Padilla and Carmelo Travieso and swingman Dana Dingle.
“He could recruit anyone because he was such a good guy,” says Indiana Pacers assistant Bill Bayno, who was an assistant on that UMass staff and Flint’s roommate. “He could go to the inner city and recruit. He could recruit kids from the country. He could recruit any player of any race or nationality because people saw the goodness in him. They trusted him. There was no BS in his approach.”
And as was the case with his father, because the players trusted him, he could push them and they would respond instead of resenting him.
“The relationships he had with the players were second to none,” says Indiana assistant Ed Schilling, who was an assistant at UMass during the Final Four season. “He had great relationships to the point that he could really, really jump them, and they knew he loved them. That was probably the biggest thing, that he could really challenge them, get on them, call them out on stuff. But no matter how much he got on them, they knew that he cared about them.”
Flint was particularly effective at getting the most out of Camby, demanding more intensity from the 6-foot-11 center, especially on defense and the glass, and he wasn’t shy about calling him out when he didn’t see the effort.
“Everyone knew how special Camby was,” says Mike Connors, who was on the staff with Flint and Schilling and then worked under Flint for the next 20 years, “but Bruiser wasn’t afraid to get in his butt and say, ‘Hey, let’s go. It’s time to play.’ You knew if it came to the point that Bruiser was getting on your ass, then, hey, it’s time to go. This is serious now.”
Flint took the same approach once he became a head coach. He could be ruthless in pointing out players’ mistakes, and he didn’t have a problem with dressing them down in front of their teammates.
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“One of the things I hated, because I consider myself a competitor and a tough kid, was if he called me soft,” says Wagner coach Bashir Mason, who, at Drexel, was a four-time member of the All-CAA Defensive Team from 2003-07. “That would get me going. Then, you just want to do something to show him that you’re not soft. His film sessions were all classic. He was really good at rewinding the same play four, five, six times and watching it over and over in front of the team. You gotta sit there and take it and decide you’re never going to put something like that on film ever again.”
But like his father, Flint made sure basketball stayed in its own realm and that his players were treated right off the court. He made sure they had food after practice and whatever gear they needed. He kept his players on their toes academically and put in a good word when careers ended and players were looking for work.
For instance, when Mason got into coaching, Flint offered him a position as his director of operations, then told him to instead pursue an opportunity to be a full-time assistant coach. When Mason told him he would be interviewing for the Wagner job, Flint spent a day with him working on his résumé and on how to answer questions, then attended the press conference when he was hired.
“He took an interest in players’ lives, and he cared about them,” Connors says. “They knew that even though he might be chewing them out, he loved them all. Some guys can’t let it go. He’s got a talent where he can just let it go, and the guys know that he cares for them. It would be just simple things like going to the funeral of a parent. Taking a kid out to lunch to say, ‘Hey, how you doing off the court? What’s going on?’ He would do a lot of things with kids to let them know everything was OK.”
At Drexel especially, that was a big part of the reason why his teams were so good defensively.
There wasn’t much complicated about his scheme. The Dragons played man-to-man, and they didn’t do much that was sophisticated in regards to pressure, but they exhaustively prepared for opponents and simply outworked and out-toughed them. From 2005-06 to 2014-15, Flint’s teams led the CAA in scoring defense four times, From 2005-06 through 2011-12, his teams gave up fewer than a point per possession every year, finishing in the top 100 nationally in adjusted defensive efficiency each season, in the top 50 four times and in the top 30 three times.
“He was a tough shit,” says Quinnipiac assistant coach Tom Pecora, who was the coach at Hofstra during much of Flint’s tenure at Drexel. “His teams took on his personality. He got tough physical kids. They never let you get to screens, much less use them. You had to match their physicality and their intensity. They tried to impose their will on you right out of the gate, so you had to match that toughnesss. Otherwise, they would just take your heart.”
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The secret to making it happen was getting the most out of his players.
“He always gets his team to play hard,” says IMG Academy coach Bobby Jordan, who was a walk-on at Drexel from 2005-09 and then joined the coaching staff in 2012. “Our guys just played so hard for him. That’s something you don’t really see as much anymore. Playing hard for a coach, it was more so how we felt about him off the court. He was so good to us and treated us so well as players and it was just more of a relationship on the court but off the court as well.”
For that reason, most of Flint’s former players stay in touch with him. So do his former coaches, managers, graduate assistants and everyone else who has been in his orbit.
“He was always that guy for me that’s if anything is going on professionally or otherwise, he’s always my first phone call,” says Queens College coach Matt Collier, a manager under Flint at UMass and an assistant under him at Drexel. “But the amazing thing about him is that he’s like that for I don’t even know how many people. He’s like that for John Calipari too. His first call is to Bruiser Flint, and there are hundreds of people who are in that same category.”
But all of that goodwill wasn’t enough to save him from bad breaks at both of his head coaching jobs.
Flint took a major hit at UMass before he even coached a game there. Before he was drafted, Camby admitted to accepting money, jewelry, rental cars and prostitutes from a pair of Connecticut-based agents. UMass was forced to vacate the 1996 Final Four appearance and return more than $150,000 worth of revenue to the NCAA.
The NCAA found the coaching staff was not responsible for the violation and that there was no reason they should have known what Camby had accepted. The staff and the program weren’t penalized further, but the program’s image took a hit, and it became much harder to get players anywhere near his caliber.
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But it didn’t change the expectations of the athletic department, which after seeing Calipari reach the Final Four set that as the bar for future success. Athletic director Bob Marcum did Flint no favors with the schedule either.
After allowing Calipari free rein, Marcum took over scheduling when Flint became coach and created an annual nonconference gauntlet that put the Minutemen against some of the country’s top teams and rarely allowed them to play at home in the Mullins Center. In Flint’s five seasons, the Minutemen played 18 nonconference home games. They played in premier tournaments, including the Maui Invitational and the Great Alaska Shootout, and took on some of the nation’s most prestigious programs, including North Carolina, Kansas, Connecticut, Tim Duncan-era Wake Forest and Texas.
So by the time the Minutemen reached conference play, they were behind the eight-ball. Even as the Atlantic-10 increased in strength, UMass posted a winning conference record in all five of Flint’s seasons and had a combined conference mark of 52-28, but it was a combined 29-44 in non-conference.
“The schedule for Bruiser was so unfair,” says Bayno, who was the coach at UNLV while Flint was at UMass. “Bruiser was playing maybe two or three guarantee games and 10 games against Carolina and the best teams in the country. It just made it almost impossible. I don’t think there’s anyone that could have done a better job than he did at UMass. But the schedule was just brutal, and it was really unfair.”
The Minutemen reached the NCAA Tournament in Flint’s first two seasons, but missed it in each of his last three. In his final season, UMass went 4-10 out of conference, but 11-5 in league play and reached the Atlantic-10 title game before losing to a Temple team that went to the Elite Eight. It came as no surprise when he was let go in 2001. The Minutemen have reached the NCAA Tournament just once since.
Drexel swooped in to get Flint. Athletic department officials liked Flint’s fiery personality and his Philly roots, and they believed it would help the Dragons as they transitioned to the Colonial Athletic Association.
“He was so much of what we needed,” says Drexel deputy athletic director Nick Gannon. “Just his influence in the city, how much respect people have for him. I don’t think we realized exactly what we were getting.”
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Flint instantly became the most popular person in the athletic department, which is housed in the Daskalakis Athletic Center, also home to Dragons games. It seats about 2,500 and has the feel of a glorified YMCA, but the setup makes for a close-knit athletic department. Flint engaged with the coaches and players of the rest of the athletic teams. He once served as a guest field hockey coach, and he would tussle with department heads to make sure other teams had the same resources he did.
Flint was named the CAA coach of the year four times, but he met his downfall because his best teams fell just short of the NCAA Tournament.
In the 2006-07 season, the Dragons claimed nonconference wins over Syracuse, Villanova, Temple, St. Joseph’s and Creighton to put itself in the bubble discussion, but they finished fourth in the CAA, lost in the conference semifinals and were ultimately left out for the NIT.
In the 2011-12 season Drexel set a school record for victories, won 19 straight games and captured the regular-season CAA title. However, the Dragons lost a 59-56 thriller to VCU in the tournament title game. One of the first four left out of the NCAA Tournament, Drexel reached the NIT quarterfinals. But Flint would never make an NCAA appearance with his hometown school.
Then came a never-ending rash of injuries and bad breaks. The most devastating were guard Chris Finch’s broken ankle in 2012-13 and guard Damion Lee’s torn ACL in 2013-14.
“It crushed our seasons,” Flint says. “That was it. I just never recovered.”
The most devastating blow came before the 2015-16 season when Lee, a two-time All-CAA pick, decided to transfer to Louisville for his fifth year. He was named All-ACC that season and eventually went to the NBA. On top of that, Utah transfer Ahmad Fields played just three games and missed the rest of the year due to injury. That team finished 6-25.
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“At that level, you don’t recover from losing to those kinds of players,” Flint says. “And that was it. It was over.”
Flint and his staff got e-mails from the athletic director the night after the Dragons lost in the 2016 CAA tournament, and he braced his assistants for what was coming. He negotiated what he considered a fair buyout, joked with athletic department officials on his way out and made it clear there were no hard feelings.
“Bru was amazing,” Gannon says. “He walked around the entire department and said goodbye. And still had his humor, still laughed with us even though people were crying. That was amazing. You want to talk about a first-class way to handle that situation. I learned a lot from Bru in that situation. He handled that decision as well as anyone who has ever been in that situation.”
He immediately focused on trying to make sure his assistants and staff members found a landing spot. Then he had to decide where to go next.
Flint can’t imagine having spent those 15 years anywhere else but Philadelphia.
He’s as proud of a Philly guy as anyone could be, a huge fan of the city’s four professional sports franchises. He reveled in the perks of being a head coach in his hometown, frequently attending games with his assistant coaches, including the World Series when the Phillies won in 2008 and lost in 2009.
He also enjoyed the opportunity to connect with childhood friends.
“When you’re home, there’s nothing like it,” Flint says. “Because you get people involved who have been involved with you for your entire life. All of your basketball people from your high school coach to your summer league coaches to the guys you played with in biddy basketball, they all come to your games. My camp was all my boys and the neighborhood guys; they all brought their kids and stuff to my camp.”
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Coming home also allowed Flint to spend time with his father during his final years. James Flint Sr. was diagnosed with cancer not long after Flint took the Drexel job in 2001, and he died in March 2004, days after Drexel was eliminated from the NIT by Villanova.
“He was still his dad’s son,” Mason says. “There were some good days. There were some bad days. He was really struggling with that. He didn’t hold back his emotion. There were days that he broke down in front of us. There were days that he was a little bit harder on us because of what he was going through. You just saw his heart.”
Of course, Flint had been without his father for 12 years by the time he was fired at Drexel, and he was also as mobile as he had ever been. He and his wife, Rene, had divorced and the couple’s daughter, Jada, was finishing her degree at Smith College in Massachusetts. She is now studying for a master’s in clinical psychology at Columbia.
Still, it isn’t easy for a Philly guy to leave Philly, so his friends in the business knew it would take a good job to get him to leave.
“I call the Philly guys all provincial,” Calipari says. “They know their neighborhood, and they know the seven blocks from their neighborhood. That’s where they stay. So it had to be a unique place where he felt comfortable with who he was working with and who he was working for.“
Indiana was just that place.
Calipari is from the Pittsburgh area, and John Miller, Archie’s father, is one of the most accomplished coaches in Western Pennsylvania basketball history. Though Archie signed with North Carolina State, Flint recruited him out of Blackhawk High School. He stayed in touch with Archie and his brother Sean, now the coach at Arizona.
When Miller took the Indiana job and saw Flint was available, he figured he’d be a good fit.
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“I loved to have the opportunity to bring him on with me just due to No. 1 his experience level,” Miller says, “but two, just how he is as a person. He’s a great person to have on your staff. He’s professional. At the same time, he’s so loyal and he’s an unbelievable sounding board.”
Flint had always been impressed by Miller, and he saw a lot of the same traits he did in Calipari, especially a thirst for basketball knowledge and the security to put trust in the hands of his assistants. He also liked the idea of working in a state that is obsessed with basketball.
“If I’m going to come back and be an assistant coach,” Flint says, “I want to go somewhere people are truly, truly passionate about it, because I came from a city where people are truly, truly passionate about their sports. That’s one of the things I enjoy about being at Indiana.”
Flint still has some culture-shock moments, but he usually appreciates them. The passion for basketball came into sharp relief last spring when he watched Romeo Langford’s playoff games with New Albany High School.
“It’s a really good basketball state,” Flint says. “It deserves the reputation it has. I remember going to watch Romeo last year in the state playoffs, and you’re like ‘I can’t believe this.’ You’re in middle of nowhere, and there are people waiting outside for like hours and hours to come in and watch this kid play. It’s crazy.”
The Hoosiers have seen an immediate impact on the recruiting trail as well as on the practice court. Flint works mostly with the forwards, and his demands of defensive intensity have done wonders for sophomore Justin Smith, who Miller says has made as big of a defensive improvement in one year as he’s ever seen. The Hoosiers have asked Smith to take on some of their toughest assignments on everyone from wings to big men, and he’s become one of the most effective players on that end.
“He’s really taken me under his wing, especially on the defensive end,” Smith says of Flint. “Trying to find different ways of motivating me and working on my defense because that’s what they need from me the most at this point right now. I’m just working with him to be more sound, get my rotations down and be a better on-ball defender.”
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While Flint is bringing his defensive intensity, he’s also learning about the areas of the game where his teams were not as good. The Dragons were almost never as impressive offensively as they were defensively. They finished in the top 100 in adjusted offensive efficiency just once.
“When I sat out the year, I said, ‘If I’m gonna go back, one of the things I want to do is look at offense,'” Flint says. “It’s different now how people play. I was very controlled, ran sets, but I did that a lot because of my personnel. So I was thinking, ‘If I’m gonna go back and be a head coach again, I want to be better offensively.’ I really like what Archie does in terms of opening up the floor, having his guys play, using screening actions, all of those things like that. His transition basketball, not only how we run it but how he teaches it for it to work, I’m learning a lot about that.”
He’s also building recruiting contacts in the Midwest and competing for top-level talent consistently for the first time in his career.
All of that should set him up well for his next move, and Flint does intend for there to be a next move. He wants to be a head coach again, and he believes the experience at Indiana will open up opportunities for him to coach somewhere that isn’t the East Coast.
“What this has been able to do is help me broaden my horizons in a lot of ways,” Flint says. “It doesn’t matter where I go to coach.”
But if a team in Philly is in the market for a coach, he’ll be happy to return home.
“I’m going to always keep my East Coast roots,” Flint says. “That’s who I am. That’s how I am. I think I’m going to always coach that way too.”
Because that’s how his father taught him.
(Top photo of Flint with Archie Miller: Joe Robbins/Getty Images)
