‘It’s just me’: How Louisiana helped mold Wichita State basketball’s walk-on sensation

Melvion Flanagan was in his element, dribbling in place near mid-court, calmly watching the final seconds of the clock tick away, waiting to pick the right moment to attack.

To the thousands of Wichita State fans at Koch Arena, it was a preposterous sight.

After all, Flanagan is a 5-foot-10 walk-on who had registered exactly three minutes in his WSU career and hadn’t played in a game for more than a month. And yet there he was last Saturday against Longwood, given an isolation clear-out to go get the Shockers a bucket like he was a star player.

A 10-hour ride away, back home in Alexandria, La., Melvin Flanagan, his father, had the game streaming on a television at the used car lot where he works. He watched jubilantly as his son shed his defender with a spin move paired with a hesitation dribble, danced his way inside the paint and finished a high-arching floater over the outstretched hands of another defender.

“Melvion always plays like he’s hungry,” his father told The Eagle. “That’s why I call him GetBucketsDotCom.”

The remarkable often begins with the preposterous, which can describe Melvion’s journey in life that saw him leave Alexandria undersized and under-recruited but prepared to make an overgrown impact in Wichita.

He has defied the odds of his situation to drain seven three-pointers and score 23 points in Wichita State’s last two wins in what is being considered the best scoring output from a walk-on in program history.

And he’s done it all with the same swagger, fearlessness and funky jump shot that he’s always used to turn doubters into believers — and become Wichita State’s walk-on sensation.

“Walk-on, that’s just a word to me,” Melvion said. “It’s just me.”

‘The gym was on the street to me’

Melvin Flanagan was an all-state player who helped his team win a Louisiana high school state championship, so he figured his son would follow in his footsteps on the basketball court.

But the moment he knew his son was a ballplayer was in the first year of playing organized team basketball.

Melvion’s favorite player was Chris Paul and he would try to imitate his spin moves and ball-handling skills on the court, but not up to his father’s standards. So Melvin told his son’s coach to not let Melvion bring the ball up the court until he could prove he could handle the rock.

Upon learning the news, Melvion didn’t pout. He went to work.

Two nights later, Melvin receives a phone call from home.

“Dad, I want to show you something when you get off work,” a young Melvion says.

“So I get off work and it’s already dark out and I come home and I’ve got my high beams on and he’s outside dribbling the ball and now he’s got the move down,” Melvin said. “I just had to laugh. ‘Well, clearly you wanted that real bad.’ He’s never been afraid to work on his game.”

There were no skills trainers or gymnasiums available to Melvion growing up, only the blacktop, outdoor basketballs and whatever rim he could find in Alexandria, a town of about 45,000 in central Louisiana.

“The gym was on the street to me,” Melvion said. “I was always outside on my own all day as a kid, just on the corner shooting or playing in an apartment complex.”

“All he did was shoot growing up,” his father said, laughing. “He’s never met a shot he didn’t like.”

About that shot — Melvion releases off-centered to the left and kicks his legs outward in a double-clutch motion — it used to drive his father crazy.

“My jump shot is picture perfect, you can ask (Wichita State coach Isaac Brown),” said Melvin, who played with Brown at Louisiana-Monroe in the early 90’s. “So I’ve been trying to get it out of him for years. We used to go to the gym after practice in high school and I would make him shoot game shots. I could never get him to shoot it right over his head, no matter what I told him, he just reverted back to the same way

“I got tired of beating myself up over it. It used to make me crazy, but I’m good with it now because I know he works on it and I know the shots go in.”

When he was a kid, Melvion was actually taller than most of his peers. But when his growth spurt stopped after middle school, he had to adjust his shot at the high school level. He said the current form he uses to this day was developed in the summer of his freshman year of high school.

“I just got used to it,” Melvion said. “It feels good to me and I just want to let it fly.”

However awkward it may look to others, it feels natural to Melvion, which is why his high school coaches never tried to alter his form.

“It does look like he has a hitch once he gets to the top of his release point, but as a coach, you have to look at the effectiveness,” said Kedric Smith, who helped coach Melvion for four years at Peabody High School. “Since Melvion was a ninth-grader, he’s been a shot-maker. It might look a little quirky, but you can’t argue with the results.”

‘Melvion has that Louisiana swag’

There is a reason why Butch Pierre, who has carved out a reputation as a stellar recruiter with past success at LSU, Oklahoma State and North Carolina State, makes it a priority every recruiting cycle to see what’s happening at Peabody.

The program, run by Charles Smith, has routinely produced Division I players, including Markel Brown, whom Pierre signed while at OSU and helped develop into the No. 44 pick in the 2014 NBA Draft.

Smith has won more than 1,000 games, claimed eight state championships, been named ESPN’s National Coach of the Year and coached in the McDonald’s All-American game.

“Kids who play in that program are winners,” said Pierre, who actually briefly signed Flanagan at Northwest Florida State in 2020. “Whenever those kids go to college, all of them are pretty successful because they know how to play.”

For Flanagan to earn a reserve spot in the rotation as a freshman on Peabody’s 38-win team that won Louisiana’s Class 3A state championship spoke volumes on what a legendary coach like Smith thought of his mettle.

“Melvion is just like that old adage: It’s not the size of the dog in the fight, it’s the size of the fight in the dog,” said Kedric Smith, an assistant at Peabody. “Melvion’s height has never deterred him from being a playmaker. Even though he’s small in stature compared to his peers, he has this unique ability to always get the job done. He’s the ultimate competitor.”

That competitive spirit was molded by his time playing pickup on the blacktop in Alexandria, a place Wichita State’s other Southern-bred hoopers can appreciate.

“You can definitely tell Melvion has that Louisiana swag,” said WSU junior Jaykwon Walton, who was raised in Columbus, Ga. “You’ve got to be tough when you grow up down South. I love it down there. I’m glad I was raised down there because there’s some tough dudes and you’ve got to have a thick layer of skin to make it out.”

“When you come from down South like us, there’s stuff you’ve been through and stuff that’s on your shoulders,” said WSU sophomore Jaron Pierre Jr., who grew up three hours away in New Orleans. “You have a purpose, a reason. It’s bigger than just basketball for us. There’s a reason why we do this. There’s a lot of people who don’t make it out, so being in this position, it’s big for us.”

Raised by Alexandria and molded by Peabody, Flanagan agreed he’s playing with a larger purpose in Wichita.

“This is something special for me right now,” Flanagan said. “Growing up, I felt like I always had to prove myself. Back home from where I’m from, there ain’t much that people are doing. I’ve got kids, people, family that look up to me back home and they expect me to do the right thing. So this feels amazing right now.”

After coaching Flanagan for four years, Smith, the coach in Peabody, noticed something about the diminutive dynamo: he isn’t fueled by hate, rather by love.

“Melvion is definitely motivated to go out and prove to people not just in the basketball world, but in life,” Smith said. “He has that chip on his shoulder, not to prove people wrong, but to prove the ones that believe in him, his teammates and his coaches, right.”

‘He hasn’t let anything or anybody change him’

To listen to his teammates, it’s not a coincidence Wichita State has crushed its competition by 33 points in the 36 minutes Melvion Flanagan has been on the court the last two games.

“You guys saw it, as soon as he got out there, we picked up the tempo immediately,” said WSU star Craig Porter after the Longwood game in which Flanagan helped turn around. “He got us going, whether it was getting baskets, getting steals or just bringing energy. That was something we needed and he brought it for us.”

Even though he made just one three-minute appearance in WSU’s first eight games, Flanagan was making an impact on the Shockers behind the scenes in practice.

His swagger and shooting ability made him the ideal scout-team player to prepare WSU’s starters for high-scoring smaller guards in real games. WSU head coach Isaac Brown fondly describes him as a pest on defense, willing to pick up Porter a full 94 feet and apply pressure.

“He’s helped our team in practice,” WSU assistant Butch Pierre said. “He’s made Porter a better player. He’s one of those kids who brings a hard hat to work every day.”

At every stop in his career, Flanagan has been a scoring machine.

He developed into a star player in the famed Peabody program, averaging 22 points his senior season and scoring 31 points in the state championship game to earn MVP honors in his second title victory. In two years at Mississippi Gulf Coast Community College, Flanagan averaged more than 20 points.

He thought he would be playing on scholarship at Prairie View A&M this season, but a coaching change nixed those plans. His father’s relationship with Brown led him to WSU, where he accepted the challenge of earning whatever comes next as a walk-on.

“The best thing about Melvion is that he hasn’t let anything or anybody change him,” WSU teammate Jaron Pierre Jr. said. “He’s always been himself. And as long as he keeps being himself, I think everything is going to work out for him.”

By every account, Flanagan never moped about not playing. He fully understood the situation he was walking into at WSU and has embraced it as well as anyone could have hoped.

“Not playing is really just about being professional,” said a 21-year-old Flanagan. “If I have to sit there and cheer on my team and get my teammates hype, then that’s what I’m going to keep doing. If I’ve got to get up and clap for my team, then I’m going to get up and clap for my team. And when it’s my time on the court, then I’ll be ready for that too.”

After his performances the last two games, he’s left Brown no choice but to include him in his rotation moving forward. The Shockers (6-4) play host to Oklahoma State at Intrust Bank Arena for an 8 p.m. game Saturday.

“I’m excited for the kid,” Brown said. “He’s brought it every day in practice on the scout team and now he’s got his opportunity and he’s taken advantage of it and now he’s one of the guys in the rotation. He’s got to continue to be a leader on the floor, run the team, make sure everybody is in their right spots, defend at a high level and he’ll continue to play.”

But just because he’s scored some points in a WSU uniform, it won’t alter Flanagan’s make-up. He’s scored plenty of points before and he’s sure to score more.

While this might be a highlight in a chapter of Flanagan’s life, his story from Alexandria is far from finished.

“I do feel good about showing everybody what I can do,” Flanagan said. “We’ve had two good wins, but we still have more ball games to win. This shouldn’t affect anything. I’ve got to keep working. There’s still work out there to be done.

“But we’re on our way.”