He’d been waking up at 5 a.m. every weekday since spring to run hills and lift weights and practice, and now it was the first of November and all of that work came down to nine yards.
Twenty-seven feet. It wasn’t just a distance to decide a football game, but a chance to measure how far Johnson C. Smith University had come.
Kelvin Durham knew that JCSU hadn’t won a CIAA conference championship since 1969. But he also knew the history was bigger than football. The university is 158 years old and proud as hell. Its alums include civil rights legends Dorothy “Dot” Counts-Scoggins, NFL trailblazer Pettis Norman, and North Carolina’s first Black Congressperson since Reconstruction, Eva Clayton. During the 1950s and ’60s, JCSU’s professors and ministers mapped out strategies to desegregate Charlotte.
By 2020, though, all that history felt distant and fragile. Dropping application numbers and enrollment, aging buildings, increasing competition, financial troubles, antiquated technology: It added up to an identity crisis for the historically Black university on Charlotte’s west side.
Preserving it required a modern overhaul and a completely new vision.
In 2021, when Charlotte launched the Mayor’s Racial Equity Initiative, one of its key pillars was restoring JCSU to prominence. A few local executives joined the school’s board of trustees.
They set out to recruit successful JCSU alums for leadership positions. They wanted people who weren’t just looking for a next career step in academia, but people passionate about Johnson C. Smith’s future and deeply vested in its legacy. In 2022, they hired Maurice Flowers, a nationally recognized football coach who grew up in Charlotte and went to East Meck High before graduating from Smith in 1996. The next year they reeled in new president Valerie Kinloch, a 1996 JCSU grad who’d been in leadership at major universities and named one of the nation’s most influential scholars.
They all agreed that football could be a flashlight to guide Johnson C. Smith into what Kinloch says will be “a new era of excellence.” Football victories cascade into shared experiences, they figured, touching undergrads and alums and anybody who might be walking past the stadium on Saturdays. They hoped success would be contagious. Outside donations helped fund a new weight room, new field turf to replace grass, more full-time coaches, and more scholarships — the basics of a competitive college football program.
Improvement quickly followed. They went 2-7 in Flowers’ first year, 7-4 the next, and 8-2 last year, falling just short of the CIAA championship game. They’d circled 2025 as the year they needed to take the next step.
And now they were nine yards away from seeing those chances dashed. It was fourth down, with 33 seconds left, and JCSU trailed perennial power and longtime nuisance Fayetteville State by four points. FSU hadn’t lost to the Golden Bulls in 10 years.
Flowers preaches that every little thing matters. Every hill run or workout, he tells them, could lead to one more yard late in a key game.
Durham dropped back to pass on fourth down. His favorite receiver wasn’t open. He looked to his right and saw some space. He scrambled a few steps before taking off.
“Oh, he’s got room to run,” an announcer on the streaming broadcast said. On the sidelines, his teammates whispered, “Go.” And then those whispers got louder, “Go! GO!”
After that, Durham doesn’t remember much.
“Everything kind of blanked out,” he told me later.
A defender closed in. Durham ran straight toward him, lowered his shoulder, and bounced over him before falling to the turf. He looked up. Maybe it was a hill run in August or a squat session in September that made the difference: He’d gained 11 yards.
Durham hopped up and called the next play in a hurry, then handed the ball to teammate Bobby Smith, who tucked in behind his offensive linemen as they pushed and pushed, before he fell into the end zone with 13 seconds left.
Touchdown. Game over. After a quick celebration and handshakes, Durham and his teammates took a knee and looked up at their coach.
Flowers is a “Girl Dad” of three young women. He says his purpose is less about winning football games than shaping the kind of young men he’d be OK letting his daughters date. He looked down at the Golden Bulls, many of whom had been there since he took over the flailing program in 2022, and he wept.
Two weeks later, Johnson C. Smith’s football team won the CIAA championship, dominating Virginia Union, 45-21. Fans in gold and blue filled the stadium in Durham and thanked them. Several members of the 1969 championship team were there.
It’s hard to overstate the importance of the CIAA, especially to old-timers who attended the schools before desegregation. Formed in 1912, it’s widely recognized as the oldest collegiate conference for historically Black institutions in the country. JCSU joined in 1926.
“I saw 82-year-old men crying like a baby,” Francis Pendergrass, a 1983 grad and member of the booster club, told me. On their way home that night, the Golden Bulls’ buses received a police escort after they crossed the Mecklenburg County line. Hundreds of fans were waiting to welcome them back to campus.
The championship secured JCSU’s first-ever appearance in the Division II national playoffs. That they lost yesterday, 21-7 to Frostburg State, hardly defines the year.
Charlotte’s had a messy few months in the national spotlight, with public safety concerns and elections and immigration raids last week. But each week since September, I spent at least some time with Flowers and his team, following their progress all season. In the shadows of controversy, the Golden Bulls were an escape, an example of what’s possible when people lift each other up instead of tearing each other down.
There are any number of think pieces and statistics about the troubled state of young men in America these days. They came of age during COVID, are entering a changing job market and an expensive housing market. In Charlotte, we’ve seen an increase in violent offenses among teen boys in the past decade.
But Johnson C. Smith’s football team is pumping out a generation of hope. About 150 players are on the roster, up from about 80 four years ago. They are large, fit, bright, and courteous. They wear their shirts tucked in on campus, dress in blazers for dinners, and say “Yes, sir” or “Yes, ma’am” with such frequency I had to ask them to stop, because they were making me feel old.
One defensive lineman is a National Guardsman who just became a father and aspires to be a firefighter. Another defensive lineman from South Mecklenburg is a 3.4 GPA student in biology, and plans to be a pharmacist one day. And then there are players like Durham, a quarterback from Miami, who likely will receive looks to play professional football.
“We all have friends back home in situations who wish they were in our situations,” Durham told me. “We all come from similar backgrounds. You know, we all have friends who are troublemakers, and we are different from that pack.”
The team has a handful of mottos and inspirational phrases, but the one they have inscribed on the back of their helmets is: “Everything, Everyday.” It’s a reminder to win small things first, before even thinking about championships.
“When you wake up, make your bed, and win that,” Jaylen Alexander, a senior defensive lineman from South Meck High, told me. “Get to practice, win every rep. Just doing little things every single day, and winning them, will build you as a person who’s consistent.”
Four years ago, when Flowers interviewed with the JCSU trustees for the job, he gave them a presentation laying out his vision for the program. He told them that success wouldn’t come without resources. They needed a new weight room, a new field, more full-time coaches, and funding to raise the number of football scholarships from about 20 at the time to 36, the Division II maximum.
In a way, he was testing them, to see if the commitment was serious. He had a good job as head coach at Fort Valley State in Georgia. He knew the history of disinvestment at JCSU better than most. He’d grown up just behind the Bojangles in Charlotte’s West End. And he was the Golden Bulls’ quarterback when they lost games by 70 points in the 1990s.
The day after his interview in late 2021, Flowers visited with my friend and Red Ventures founder Ric Elias, who was a trustee at the time. Flowers was still skeptical. Elias asked Flowers again what he needed to be successful, and he said that he would help fund the field and weight room and equipment, on one condition: The players would be excellent students, too.
Flowers agreed. Since he arrived, the team’s average GPA has risen from 1.9 to 3.2. He wants it to be 3.5.
Ric will not like this section of this story; he insists it’s not about him and doesn’t want attention. But as Flowers insisted otherwise: “This doesn’t happen without Ric Elias,” Flowers told me this week. “He saw us as champions before any of us did.”
Ric has regular calls with Flowers to help him through any troubles. He visits with the team regularly to provide motivational speeches. In early September, I tagged along with him before their Week 3 game. “We use football as a way to change an institution,” he told them. “What I’m most proud of is not that you guys are winning, but you guys are literally changing the school.”
He closed the talk by leading them in a call and response, using a motto that carried them through the season.
“We are …” Elias said.
And the players responded, “Not done yet.”
As the national anthem played before the homecoming game on September 26, a yellow and blue butterfly drifted between me and a JCSU cheerleader, then floated from the home sideline across the field to the visitors’ sideline, like it was circling the field.
The Golden Bulls were coming off their first loss, a bad showing against defending conference champion Virginia Union. They were 3-1 and needed to win the remaining six games on their schedule to reach the CIAA championship.
Flowers and his team say they have “the best view in D-2.” On a hill near I-77, the stadium’s southeastern end zone gives way to a clear frame of Charlotte’s skyline.
Flowers uses the view as a recruiting tool. “We are able to say to a kid, ‘This is your future. Not just the football field. The city of Charlotte.’”
The team’s now up to more than 30 scholarships. Flowers uses the budget to build the puzzle each year. A player who qualifies for some financial aid only requires a few scholarship dollars to cover the rest of tuition and room and board. One who gets no financial aid needs more.
In an age when top-level Division I college athletes can earn six figures through NIL contracts, Division II football remains mostly pure in its definition of “student-athletes.” Flowers can still set old-school rules and standards, across the board, for academics.
During the week, players are required to be in the locker room by 5:45 a.m. They get taped up, stretch, and practice from about 6:30 to 8:30. Then they go to classes. In the afternoons they watch film and go over the evolving game plan. From 6 to 8 p.m., they have study hall and tutoring. Then they go to bed and do it again the next day.
Each young athlete is complex. Flowers nurtures the ones who need nurturing, and comes down hard on the ones who need a reality check.
One example: Players must keep their lockers tidy. Earlier this year, though, he saw one player’s underwear hanging on a hook. Flowers pulled him aside and reminded him of the policy. The player’s response gutted him.
“Coach,” the young man said, “I only have two pairs of underwear.”
Flowers called in his assistants and asked them to meet with each player and open the lines of communication: If they ever need personal items, they can tell a coach, in private.
He asked city council members James Mitchell and Malcolm Graham to connect him with any organizations that could supply extra clothes of various sizes. They found donors. Now, the football team has a “store” — a room full of socks, underwear, jeans, shoes. If a player needs something, he can just call Flowers and set up a time to come in with nobody else around.
“That way we help them keep their dignity, too. With a young man, it’s all about strength. They can’t be seen as weak,” Flowers said. “To me, that’s going to be bigger than any win that we ever have on the doggone football field. … It sounds like Coach Speak, but we want to help you be better husbands, better fathers, and all of those things. That’s what it’s really about.”
A funny thing happens, though, when you focus on those broader goals: You also win games.
JCSU bounced back from that Virginia Union loss with a 69-13 homecoming victory over Bluefield State, setting several school records in the process. Then they went on the road to beat Virginia State and Shaw, before coming home for a rivalry game against Winston-Salem State in late October.
WSSU is a state school and one of the most popular HBCUs in the South, with an athletic history that includes Basketball Hall of Famers Earl “The Pearl” Monroe and Clarence “Big House” Gaines. The Rams, who have a huge alumni base in Charlotte, have 12 CIAA football championships.
Flowers started his pregame talk before the WSSU game the same way he always does: “Whose father?” he said.
“Our Father,” the team responded, and then all 80 or so players sounded out the Lord’s Prayer in unison, in a fast-paced tempo.
Standing against the wall was a visitor. Luke Kuechly, the Panthers’ great linebacker, had come to watch them play. The Golden Bulls greeted him with a traditional, “Luuuuke” before taking the field.
“Did you see how they did the prayer?” Kuechly said to me on the sidelines later. “There’s a cadence to it. Not like in church. And they all said it the same way, on the same cadence. Bad teams don’t do that. Little things like that tell you, that’s a team that knows each other. That team’s together.”
That culture was just right for players like Darion Johnson. Five years ago, Johnson was lost. He was constantly in arguments with his parents about his future. He took a job at a factory and was sleeping on a couch at his sister’s place in Chicago. He played a couple of seasons of junior college football, but junior colleges don’t offer scholarships, so he worked jobs alongside classes and football.
He joined the National Guard for stability. “And then I realized, ‘Oh, man, maybe Mom and Dad weren’t so wrong,” he told me. “Growing up as a kid, you think, ‘Why are my parents always nitpicking the littlest things?’ But then I got older I realized those littlest things turn into the biggest things.”
Put another way: Everything, Everyday.
Johnson and his fiancée had a baby girl in late September. He aspires to be a firefighter after he finishes his JCSU degree. But for now, he’s part of one of the best defenses in Division II football, a new dad, and a military service member. He had a 1.6 GPA in junior college, but now it’s up to about 2.8, he says. And every time he walks down the hill from the locker room to the field, he pauses to appreciate the opportunity.
“It’s the best view that I’ve ever seen on a football field in my whole life. … It takes my heart away every single time,” he told me. The view helps reinforce a perspective he’s come to have about football, he says. “Even if we lose in the playoffs but we still graduate all our guys and we get the GPA goal that we want, we’ve won in life.”
With Kuechly watching that Saturday in late October, JCSU trounced Winston-Salem State, 52-27, setting up the game with league-leading Fayetteville State the following weekend.
For all the new fans JCSU’s gained during this renaissance, their most outspoken and devoted is the university president.
Kinloch arrived at Johnson C. Smith as a first-generation college student in 1992. She went on to become an associate dean at Ohio State and then the University of Pittsburgh’s dean of the School of Education. But, as she tells everyone, she’s “a Golden Bull for life.”
Her inauguration weekend in April 2024 was full of celebrations and promises. In one powerful and fun moment during her inaugural address, she started a sentence with, “As president …” She intended to follow it up with a list of things she wanted to accomplish. But saying the words out loud choked her up. She paused, thought about her journey, then looked over at the students and said, “I’m your president, y’all.” They whooped and cheered.
That sincerity and passion for the school, along with an impressive resume, made her the ideal president to lead JCSU out of its troubles and into the future, the trustees say. I met with her in March 2024, and over the course of an hour she shared her vision for weaving the university into the fabric of the city and its surrounding West End neighborhood. Kinloch’s spent most of her first two years reshaping university leadership, including bringing in a new athletics director last year.
A tough headline came this summer when an accrediting agency put JCSU on a one-year “probation for good cause” because of issues with financial oversight, mostly due to matters from before Kinloch’s time. The accrediting agency began formally monitoring the university for the issues years ago, and issued a report in June 2023, two months before Kinloch moved here. The agency’s June 2025 report noted that JCSU had “demonstrated significant recent accomplishments in addressing non-compliance,” and decided to place it on probation rather than strip it of its accreditation. The accreditors will revisit next June.
In other words, even as the football program surges, the university itself is still being watched, still proving it can sustain the turnaround. Kinloch responded with a letter that said “we accept the charge to grow.” She tells me that many of the issues are due to outdated systems and reporting, all of which she and her leadership team have been modernizing.
“Coach Flowers says ‘brick by brick’ when he talks about building the football program,” Kinloch told me. “I take that same approach with the university.”
Kinloch makes regular appearances at practices, often unannounced, to show the team she’s there. She stands on the sidelines during games, hugging and chopping it up with everyone from donors to ballboys. She speaks to the team after games to let them know how proud she is, calling out players by name. On Saturday, when a running back came off with an ankle injury, Kinloch circled the medical tent to make sure he’d be OK.
“That’s the difference,” football assistant David Bowser, who’s coached at several schools during his career, told me earlier this year. “When your AD, your president, and your coach are all on the same page, that’s the difference.”
So it was no surprise that, when JCSU traveled to Fayetteville for the make-or-break game on November 1, Kinloch was there.
And after Durham, the quarterback, got those nine yards and the Bulls scored the winning touchdown, Kinloch was at the center of it, hopping around on the sidelines and hugging Flowers while he wept.
The next week, as the final seconds ticked off the clock in a season-finale victory over Livingstone, which officially clinched JCSU’s spot in the CIAA championship, Kinloch was on the track, dancing in unison with the cheerleaders.
And of course she was in Durham to celebrate the victory in the CIAA championship game.
“Progress has happened, it feels like overnight, and yet it’s been a lot of hard work,” she told me of the football team. “They’ve led the way, and not just because of what they do on the football field.”
Yesterday, that stadium with the “best view in D2” was mostly full with nearly 4,300 people in the stands. An overflow crowd gathered to watch through the fence on top of a hill between the stadium and campus.
Frostburg State brought pressure all game, taking advantage of JCSU’s depleted offensive line — one player was starting his first game ever, due to injury — and Durham, a quarterback selected to a national all-star game in December, never found his usual rhythm. He did connect on a touchdown with his favorite receiver, Deandre “Biggie” Parker, in the third quarter. But it wasn’t enough. JCSU lost its first playoff game 21-7.
Afterward, the team came to the sidelines, several players spilling tears, to sing the alma mater. The band director paused before kicking off the song and said they just wanted to thank the team first. The band clapped, and then the remaining fans all cheered, too.
Then the players took a knee and looked up at Flowers one last time this year.
“They’re not losses. We do what with them?”
“Lessons,” the players responded.
“We’ve learned a lesson. It’s a hurtful lesson, but I’m gonna tell you what: I ain’t about to be upset about this one. … Yes it hurts but I’m gonna tell you something: We’re history-makers.”
Then he led the team through its chorus of values, in a call and response.
“Work hard,” he said, and the players responded, Work hard.
Improve every day.
Improve every day.
Be the best.
Be the best.
No excuses.
No excuses.
Refuse to lose.
Refuse to lose.
One heartbeat.
One heartbeat.
Then he held up his hand and said, “‘Not done yet’ on three. One, two, three.”
Not done yet.
Jaylen Alexander, the senior from South Mecklenburg, came up to me afterward. Flowers had told me all season that recruiting “J.A.,” as Alexander is nicknamed, was one of the key first steps in the building process. He’s 6-foot-5 and 230 pounds, fitting the physique that JCSU hopes to have in the future. But he’s also respected by his teammates for another reason: He never missed a practice, was never late to a practice, for four seasons.
He came to Johnson C. Smith in 2022, Flowers’ first year, back when they played on a field that was a mix of grass and dirt. In his first game, some tackles produced dust clouds. But he believed in Flowers’ vision.
Now he’s a senior, applying for pharmacy schools, one of the faces of the turnaround. When it was over yesterday, I asked what was running through his mind.
He smiled and said, “It’s the start of a dynasty.”
Editor’s note: We corrected this story to show that president Kinloch graduated in 1996, not 1995.