Flores went 123-75 in his seven seasons leading the Skyhawks, including two 20-win seasons. His teams made six RMAC Tournament appearances, and in 2016, his squad became the first in RMAC history to knock off a No. 1 seed in the conference tournament as the No. 8 seed, as the Skyhawks went to Golden and beat Colorado School of Mines before later falling in the conference championship game at CSU-Pueblo.<\/p>\n
Flores also was an associate head coach of FLC from 2000-04 on the staff of Patty Patton Shearer. During those years, FLC went 60-49 after the staff inherited a team that had gone 3-23 the previous season. Flores then left FLC to serve as the assistant coach at the University of Nebraska-Omaha for eight seasons.<\/p>\n
He got his coaching start as an assistant at Catalina Foothills High School in Tucson, Arizona, shortly after he graduated from the University of Arizona in 1995. At Catalina, Flores was part of the school\u2019s Class 4A state championship in 1997.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s been a long time in coaching, and I\u2019m going to miss the uniqueness of coaching,\u201d Flores said. \u201cYou start every year with a ground point, and you\u2019re constantly building the entire season. Every year goes a little different, but you always have those close-knit relationships and the daily competitiveness of trying to be better. It\u2019s stressful being a coach. It might be one of the only professions where there\u2019s a scoreboard and people write about it. That\u2019s also the fun of it and the challenge of it. It\u2019s always, \u2018How good can we get?\u2019 It\u2019s about being successful and learning life lessons.\u201d<\/p>\n
Flores and his wife, Allison, have two young daughters, Mackenzie and Macy. As a coach, Flores instilled one lesson above all else to his assistant coaches, and that was to take care of the players as if they were their own children. It was one of the first conversations he had last season with assistant coach Orlando Griego, who Thursday was named interim head women\u2019s basketball coach.<\/p>\n
\u201cI never really understood what that meant until my daughter came into the world last season,\u201d Griego said. \u201cWith Coach Flo, it was about pushing (the players) to be good students, pushing them to be great people and then great basketball players. Make them do their best and require them to be great in anything they do. It was more the life lesson of being a good person. For me as a coach, it was about finding good people, bringing them here and helping them be great.\u201d<\/p>\n It is that lesson Flores hopes to now bring to the entire FLC athletic department.<\/p>\n \u201cWe are going to do things for the greater good,\u201d Flores said. \u201cIt was a hard decision to take this job because I was doing something I loved and have a passion for. The thing that overrides that is having the chance to hopefully make an impact for everyone. The servant-leadership style is important to me, and that means to help all the coaches and hopefully do good things for them and the student-athletes. That\u2019s something I\u2019ve wanted to do for a while now. Giving up coaching is hard, but doing something for the greater good makes it an easy decision.<\/p>\n \u201cI wouldn\u2019t have applied or accepted this if I didn\u2019t know that our administration was going to be one the same page with that. We will have a good, working relationship, and we really need that.\u201d<\/p>\n