‘It was personal’: Behind the college football transformation at a top Charlotte HBCU

In spring of 2022, Ardrey Kell High School football star Brevin Caldwell was evaluating his options for college.

The one place he told his father he would never, ever , go? Johnson C. Smith University, just down the road from his high school near uptown Charlotte.

“They were so bad,” Caldwell said. “I was familiar with how bad they had been and I was like, ‘I’ll never go there.’”

And it’s true: J.C. Smith football has been around a long time, and it’s been bad a long time.

In December of 1892, the Bulls, then known as Biddle University, played at Livingstone College. That was the first football game between black colleges.

For the next 130 years, Smith won one CIAA conference title, in 1969, and has generally been a poster child for football futility. From 2005-22, Smith won 56 games — an average of 3.2 per season.

Caldwell at least knew some of that, and he was about to fax his letter of intent to another in-state HBCU when his phone rang.

It was the Bulls’ new head coach, Maurice Flowers, who grew up in Charlotte, played high school ball in Charlotte and became a star at Johnson C. Smith in the 1990s. And Flowers began to sell Caldwell with a pitch he’s used effectively to quickly turn around a program that many coaches before him have failed to remake.

Flowers’ plan was to draw a 90-mile-wide circle around the center of Charlotte and recruit the heck out of that; to seek out top talent transferring down from higher levels for more opportunity; and to seek out athletes who were also serious about the classroom.

Flowers told Caldwell the same thing he tells anyone else he talks to about his vision:

If you’re serious about the classroom, you’ll be serious about everything else.

Caldwell didn’t send that fax, and has become a key part of a Golden Bulls team that is 2-0 for the first time since 2013 and hosts Lincoln University (0-1) at 1 p.m. Saturday. This year’s start comes after Smith finished 7-4 under Flowers last season, just missing tying the school-record of eight wins, a mark last reached in 1975.

“God sent me here,” Caldwell said. “Coach Flowers told me that school will be paid for and why not be a part of the change here? I had prayed on it, for God to open a door for me in terms of which school to go to, and when (Flowers) called, right before I faxed my letter to go to Winston-Salem State, man, I knew it was God talking.”

The man with the plan

J.C. Smith, now ranked No. 2 in a national HBCU coaches poll , began the season playing Tuskegee in the Red Tails Classic in Montgomery, Alabama.

Flowers, 55, looked up into the stands, before a 21-13 win, and saw a huge contingent of Johnson C. Smith fans. He got a little emotional. He said he remembers all the years of poor attendance at home games, many at Memorial Stadium in the center of the city. He remembers fans leaving games after watching the Bulls’ phenomenal band perform at halftime. He remembers fans putting brown paper bags over their heads in frustration.

He said that’s one of the main reasons he’s here.

Making Smith win is personal for him.

“We had a game last week at Morehouse and I’ve never seen an away JC Smith crowd like that,” Flowers said. “It was 3-1 in favor of JCSU. I was in amazement at how Smith traveled. Smith had a fantastic crowd at the Red Tails. As as alum, I’m just very, very elated and glad to be the head coach here. And I feel like if we put a good product on the field and we practice well, then you’re preparing yourself to have good results on game day.”

Flowers replaced Kermit Blount, who was fired in November 2021. In six years, Blount’s teams were 16-42 and never had a winning season. The Bulls were 1-7 the year he was let go.

Flowers sought the job here. After starting his coaching career at Myers Park High School as an assistant in 1996, Flowers was head or assistant high school coach at stops in Charlotte, Texas and South Carolina before landing his first college job as an offensive coordinator at Smith 14 years ago.

When the Smith job came open, Flowers was at his sixth different D2 college job, head coach at Fort Valley State, where he led the program to a 7-5 record in two seasons, including a two-game COVID year.

“It was personal for me here,” Flowers said, “because I had a history that wasn’t a winning history here, outside of individual accolades. I was a preseason All-American (at Smith, as a quarterback), but as team, which really counts, I didn’t win. But when I came back as the head coach, I knew the process. You’re not going to erase 40 years of averaging 2.3 wins in one season. The administration knew that and that’s what they brought me back for: to build a winner.”

The plan, the foundation and the wins

To get started, Flowers had a wish list, which he said the Smith school administration was behind. Historically, Smith had been underfunded with scholarships, falling well behind many of its CIAA counterparts and well under the D2 maximum of 36 total full scholarships, which can be divided among players, who sometimes fill in the gaps with academic scholarships, grants and financial aid.

“Smith was serious about it,” Flowers said. “There was no pushback when we were trying to do this.”

Now, Smith is near the max in the scholarship department, Flowers said, and the school also checked the other boxes on his wish list: new weight room, new locker room, new turf field.

And most importantly, the school paid for him to hire more coaches.

When Flowers was at Smith before as an assistant, the school had five full-time coaches, including the head coach.

Flowers said his staff now has 10 full-timers, plus two grad assistants.

“Now we can go out and really recruit,” he said. “This area is a recruiting hotbed. I think kids want to stay home and be near family who can come to see them play, and they want to play with and against guys they played in high school.”

One of Flowers’ biggest recruiting wins was getting former Havelock High running back Kamarro Edmonds onto campus. Edmonds was a top 200 national four-star recruit in high school who played at North Carolina.

Part of Flowers’ recruiting pitch was telling Edmonds that he would play with guys he knew about or knew personally, such as former Charlotte Catholic lineman Ari Rodriguez, a Bulls sophomore who started his career at Navy.

Rodriguez and Catholic played Havelock and Edmonds in the 2021 N.C. state championship game.

Flowers said that of his 120 players, about half are from that 90-mile radius around Charlotte. He said he feels that his plan — and the changes Smith made to lock him in — are working.

Flowers’ first team was 2-7 but lost five games by a touchdown or less. In year 2, Smith started winning those close games. That 7-4 season in 2023 included a 35-31 win over Winston-Salem State, a rival Smith had not beaten since 1996, and the school’s first appearance in a bowl game in 12 years, when it won the Pioneer Bowl.

The last time Smith played in a postseason bowl before 2011? 1941, when the Bulls won the Flower Bowl Classic.

Last season, Smith lost 23-10 to Fort Valley State in the Florida Beach Bowl, but the positive momentum, the players say, was clear.

“We had to learn how to win,” Caldwell said. “We lost a lot of close games at the very end of that first year. Then, we started winning those games (in 2023), even though we let some we should’ve won slip through our fingers. But I feel, now, that this is the turnover year where we start winning big.”

Nation’s best lands at Smith, and now what?

In January, Flowers landed quarterback Darius Ocean, who was a star at Hough High School and who played at Western Kentucky and Valdosta State.

Ocean was looking for a chance to play and Flowers offered him a legitimate shot, with no favorites.

A few months later, Flowers had another stroke of luck when he was able to land former Harding High star Quavaris Crouch. At one time, Crouch was the nation’s No. 1 high school football recruit. He started his career at Tennessee, transferred to Michigan State and ran into some hard times and was briefly out of football .

Crouch tried to enroll with the Charlotte 49ers, but it didn’t work out. With Flowers, it did. Now, Smith had the type of recruit the school had never had, and Flowers had another former D1 talent — like Ocean and Rodriguez and Edmonds — who had multiple years of eligibility and could continue to help him get Smith out of the football basement.

“Getting Crouch was a surprise,” Flowers said, “but what made it easier was he knew so many of the guys here. I feel like we’ve got a big family.”

That’s certainly what attracted Ocean, who graduated from Hough High in 2020. When he was leaving Valdosta State, he nearly went to Barton, but ...

“I had heard about Coach Flowers,” he said. “Actually, I’d heard a lot about Coach Flowers. He’s a well-known name in Charlotte and coaches at Hough told me how good he was. And I’ve never been around HBCU life. It’s different. The people are more, like, together, and I’ve never been used to something like that. But I expected the football to be exactly how it was. I had high expectations about Coach Flowers. He met them.”

Ocean has thrown for 390 yards and five touchdowns in two games. A year ago, no Smith quarterback threw for more than 550 in the entire season.

Crouch is leading the team in rushing, with 194 yards and a touchdown.

Caldwell has 230 receiving yards and five touchdowns.

On defense, former West Charlotte High star Benari Black leads the team in tackles, with 17; and former Mallard Creek Maverick Shamar Baker leads the team with two interceptions.

That all of those players are from Charlotte is part of Flowers’ plan, too.

“If you follow his formula and his blueprint,” Ocean said, “I feel like no one is going to be surprised. I feel a lot of love here. You walk around campus and the police know who you are, teachers know you. It’s pretty good to be a Golden Bull. The campus is smaller and even the president is in tune with everything.

“Man, it just feels good.”

Flowers? He thinks this is all just a good start.

“My outlook is that all the guys you’re listing are the skill position guys,” he said. “The last thing that comes to a D2 program, the thing you need to make the big leap, is linemen. I’m very happy with the linemen we have but we what we haven’t had is the drop-down, transfer portal offensive and defensive lineman. That’s what comes next.

“Those guys are in high demand and if they drop down to a D2, it’s a D2 with some clout for winning that can promise that they’ll graduate and get a shot at the NFL. That’s what’s next for us. Once you start to build a winner, you’ll get those linemen, too.”