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CHICAGO -- In 2011, four-year-old Kingston Flemings was playing with his older brother and cousins in his aunt’s neighborhood cul-de-sac. As a ball rolled between two parked cars, Flemings shimmied between them to chase after it. He didn’t see an oncoming car, and the driver didn’t see him. Next came a sickening thud.
Flemings was knocked down and run over by the car’s rear tire. He was rushed to the hospital. His hip was broken. His spleen was punctured. Tire tread marks were imprinted on his pants and shirt.
Miraculously, Flemings spent only a few days in the pediatric ICU. Eventually, he made a full recovery and has since suffered no long-lasting physical effects from the accident. His mentality changed though. Since that day, he has always appreciated the value of time.
"Life’s not guaranteed at the end of the day. I could not be here right now, but luckily I am," Flemings told The Sporting News. "Really taking every single day one day at a time, and using all 24 hours if you can. Obviously you gotta sleep, but using every hour that you’re awake to your advantage. Not taking it for granted, because some people here on Earth today, they’re not going to be here tomorrow."
Not many NBA prospects can say that they have survived a near-death incident as a toddler. Kingston Flemings is not like other prospects. The fastest guard in the class has always been on a full-on sprint toward the NBA. Even a 4,000-pound car could not slow him down.
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There’s a certain cookie-cutter checklist that top prospects adhere to once they are identified as NBA hopefuls in high school. First comes an elite prep school. Next are showcase AAU teams in Florida and California. Then a blue blood college program. It all hopefully leads to an invitation to the green room during the NBA draft.
Flemings had opportunities to check those boxes. But when the high school basketball factories like IMG and Montverde came calling, he politely turned them down. Instead, he stayed with his public school in San Antonio and Koty Cowgill, the Brennan High School coach that had helped train him alongside his father since first grade.
Cowgill started an AAU team, the San Antonio Futures, with Flemings’ dad in those early days. They didn’t hold tryouts, instead recruiting players who fit into the basketball family alongside Flemings and Cowgill’s son Camden, born six months earlier than Kingston.
The Futures were inseparable, sleeping over at each other’s houses on the weekends. Cowgill compared their childhood to the movie "The Sandlot."
"He grew up with the same kids. The days change, you come back tomorrow, you always know the game’s going on," Cowgill told SN. "You always know where to find them. Grew up like family all the way through."
Flemings was far from a basketball-only child. He ran track at the Junior Olympics. He played tennis with Cowgill’s younger son. He was a safety in football. But basketball was his passion. He would get up at least 500 shots per day starting in elementary school. He’d practice with his younger sister Bella, who was taller than him until middle school and is now a star recruit for Duke.
His games with Cam Cowgill were some of the most intense. They would play one-on-one to five for an hour a day. When game point rolled around, they’d be shoving each other into the mats to prevent a winning basket.
"In their mind, at that moment, it was life and death," Koty said. "It was a battle."
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Flemings had to learn how to control that intense competitive streak. When he was in first grade, he would commit wild flagrant fouls at the end of losses because of how badly he wanted to win.
When Flemings was 12, his family took a vacation to Cuba. He and Bella spent their nights locked into rounds of the card game Phase 10 upon Kingston’s insistence. Things got so heated that he was nearly kicked out of their Airbnb for his over-the-top intensity. Bella told the Houston Chronicle that it remains one of her favorite memories.
Eventually, Flemings learned how to channel that competitive drive into a maniacal routine. In high school, he would wake up at 5 in the morning to get his shots up. He’d go to classes, where he maintained an A average academically. Then he’d get his work in with a skills trainer after school.
Houston assistant coach Kellen Sampson was in charge of recruiting players. He visited Flemings and came away amazed at the work ethic.
"It was exhausting just being an observer," Sampson said, "To see a young fella go through the totality of that day, then go out and travel on the weekends with San Antonio Futures."
Flemings only intensified his training regimen after committing to Houston. During his senior year, he would make the monotonous three-hour drive on I-10 from San Antonio to Houston for intense workouts on Fridays. Then he’d make the same drive back home on Sunday afternoon.
Nothing got in the way of those training sessions, not even his senior prom. Sampson tried to convince Flemings to skip one weekend for the high school milestone, urging him to cherish his adolescence.
"Coach, that doesn’t move me," Sampson recalled Flemings saying. "I would be doing something I wouldn’t want to do. I would much rather be in the gym working out."
When Flemings wasn’t training, he was watching other sports or adjusting his fantasy lineups. He’s a junkie of all leagues but counts the Seattle Seahawks as one of his favorite teams.
Flemings has an opinion on everything sports-related but is particularly sharp when it comes to the NBA. Cade Cunningham is his favorite player. Flemings saw the jump coming for Detroit from 44 wins last year to a surprising 60 this season, telling anyone who would listen about them.
"Every reason they’re good right now is why Kingston said they would be a contender," Sampson said.
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That high-level understanding of the game is one of Flemings’ most slept-on traits.
"When you see me playing, I’m noticing a lot of things during the game. Certain things they are doing in their ball screens or how they’re doing their plays," Flemings said. "It’s a little overlooked, because you can’t really measure that with your eyes. You can see a player, oh, you got that steal there, but you don’t know how I got that steal. I saw the screen coming off. I saw how the player was looking. I saw how the dude was slipping. You ain’t see all that, you just saw how the steal happened."
Flemings has been overlooked before. Standing at 6-foot-2, it's an easy mistake to make. He was one of the last cuts for the McDonald’s All-American game. Sampson tried to lessen the sting of that snub.
"We were telling him how he got screwed, blah blah blah, giving him every reason and every excuse. We were providing a crutch, trying to make him feel better," Sampson said.
Flemings took in their words with a shrug, refusing to accept their excuses. Instead, he highlighted three or four games where he should have been better.
"I felt like I did enough, but I also left some meat on the bone," Sampson recalled Flemings saying. "Nobody does that. Forget a 17-year-old, nobody does that."
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Flemings has a brutal sense of self-awareness and a lack of ego. He’s also willing to push back when he thinks he is right.
During the recruitment process, Sampson sat down with Flemings and told him that he needed to develop a reliable floater.
"I don’t really need that shot if my midrange is on point," Flemings countered respectfully. "That’s not a great shot for me. My midrange is."
Flemings went on to be one of the most prolific and successful midrange shooters in college basketball last season, taking only six floaters on the year.
"In the best of ways, Kingston can be stubborn," Sampson said. "He’s not going to capitulate unless he knows why we’re doing it. He’s not going to mindlessly or aimlessly do it without context, why or how it impacts winning."
Flemings knows who he is, and he knows how to get to where he wants to go. He signed up for a notoriously tough Houston program that challenges players with intense practices and prides itself on stifling defense because he felt that he could handle it.
"Kingston was walking around, first week with his shirt off, owning the space," Cowgill added. "He has an unshakable self-confidence."
On Thursdays, Houston runs its most competitive drill. They play 4-on-4-on-4, with extra running on any turnover. Flemings dominated the first time running it.
"Best player in the gym, no arguments," Sampson said. "This isn’t a normal freshman. This is a dude that is coming to turn heads. He’s one of the few kids I’ve been around who is ridiculously 1000 percent comfortable in his own skin."
Flemings will be a lottery pick soon, but he's too down-to-Earth for the status to change him. He identifies as a community kid that is loyal to the circle he formed as a child. He’s a player that figures out the best answer and is usually right. Most of all, he knows that time is precious. He's using his to pursue his passion.
"I get to the gym 5:30, 5:45, and Kingston’s beating me in the gym, and he’s playing roll out ones with his high school friends. He’s not getting anything out of that except the same thing he was doing during lunch in high school," Cowgill said. "He’s the same guy, just unchanged completely."
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