Cooper Flagg created a splash online Friday with a social media post following his visit this week to Duke University, but the Newport native has yet to make a commitment to play basketball at the school, his mother said.
Flagg, 16, one of the top high school basketball prospects in the country, has received scholarship offers from several NCAA Division I powerhouse programs. On Friday, he posted pictures on Instagram of himself in a Duke uniform, with Duke championship trophies and with Jon Scheyer, the team’s head coach. Flagg wrote “Duke nation how we feeling? #brotherhood” in the post.
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Kelly Flagg, however, said in a text message that her son wasn’t announcing a commitment to Duke, and that the pictures were simply from his visit there this week.
Flagg played at the Hoophall Classic in Massachusetts in January, where he was asked about his interest in Duke.
“(It’s a) dream school obviously, but there’s still so many more options that I want to look into and everything like that,” Flagg said, according to ZagsBlog.com.
The 6-foot-8, 200-pound Flagg will enter his junior year this fall at Montverde Academy in Florida, one of the top high school programs in the country. He is ranked first nationally among Class of 2025 prospects according to Rivals.com, and second according to ESPN’s recruiting database. Since leading the Nokomis boys’ basketball team to the Class A championship in 2022, Flagg has continued his meteoric rise at Montverde. He was third on the team with 9.8 points per game, and led the Eagles with 1.6 steals and 2.2 blocks per contest.
Flagg has dazzled his last two summers. In 2022, he was named the USA Basketball Male Athlete of the Year after leading Team USA’s U17 team, at 15 years old, to the gold medal at the FIBA World Cup while averaging 9.3 points and a team-high 10 rebounds per game. This summer, Flagg led the Maine United AAU team to the championship game of the high-profile Peach Jam tournament in South Carolina, scoring 34 points with 20 rebounds in the semifinal.
Performances like those have drawn the interest of the country’s best college basketball teams. According to his Twitter feed, Flagg has received offers from a list of schools including Kansas, Villanova, Connecticut, UCLA and Texas, as well as Duke.
Flagg’s post was his first featuring him wearing another school’s uniform, with the pictures taken during his visit to Duke on Tuesday and Wednesday. Maine United Coach Andy Bedard said Flagg’s trip to Duke was an unofficial visit; the NCAA allows high school basketball players to make their only official visit to a school, for which the school pays for expenses, starting Aug. 1 of their junior year.
Flagg cannot officially accept an athletic scholarship to any college until the fall of his senior year. Until high school athletes sign a letter of intent to accept a scholarship, college coaches are prohibited from commenting on them, according to NCAA rules.
Efforts to interview Cooper Flagg for this story were unsuccessful.
There has been speculation on social media that Flagg will reclassify to the Class of 2024, allowing him to start college a year early. Kelly Flagg, in a text message, said that speculation is “just a rumor at this point,” and responded on social media to one report of Flagg’s reclassifying as “untrue.”
Flagg would be one of the most coveted recruits regardless of classification year, but a move to 2024 would make him so by a wide margin, according to Rivals.com national basketball analyst Rob Cassidy. That class, Cassidy said, is not a strong one, and should Flagg reclassify, it would make the jobs of recruiting analysts everywhere significantly easier.
“There are some inconsistent guys in ’24, and it would help me exponentially if he could reclassify,” Cassidy said. “When you have a guy like Cooper at the top, it helps a guy like me sleep easier at night because I don’t have to worry about looking bad three years down the road. You know he’s going to be legit.”
Flagg’s Instagram post was picked up by other outlets, including Bleacher Report, the National Interscholastic Basketball Conference (Montverde’s league) and Duke basketball reporter Ryan Lommen. The images of Flagg in Duke colors generated excitement across different social media platforms.
“LETS GET IT You’d be a great addition to the brotherhood,” one person commented on Instagram.
“Let’s gooo! Sign the commit,” another wrote.
The buzz continued on X, formerly called Twitter.
“This is Zion levels of hype I’d have if the kid came to Durham,” one person wrote.
“Not a want, it’s a need to have @Cooper_Flagg at Duke in 2024,” another commented.
Morning Sentinel reporter Mike Mandell contributed to this report.
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