By MARIO AGUIRRE | STAFF WRITER
If ever he had any questions in his first year coaching, McAllen High’s Ryan Flores felt comfortable knowing he had a family member that was able to answer it.
After all, his father, Robert, has coached the past 43 years at a variety of schools across the Valley. His uncle, Sam Cortez, has led McAllen Memorial for the past decade. And his cousin, Randy Bocanegra, leads the PSJA North team, for whom he was most recently named All-Valley Girls Basketball Coach of the Year.
With all that experience and knowledge at his disposal, Flores felt comfortable making the leap after serving as an assistant the past 10 years at McAllen Rowe and McAllen Memorial before taking the head job at McHi.
In only his year as a head coach, he led a senior cast into the fourth round of the postseason, which only three other public schools in the Valley did this year. And more impressively, he did it with a group whose individuals were not among the Valley’s leaders in any statistical category.
Because of that, Flores is the All-Valley Boys Basketball Coach of the Year.
“That’s the true meaning of team,” Flores said about his players not cracking the top 25 spots in individual stats. “That’s what we try to relay to the kids. It could be one player one game, and another player the next game. But if we set up as five players on the team, there’s very few teams in the Valley that could stop us.
“It’s very hard to stop a basketball team that has five players on the floor that can score, five guys on the floor that can defend, five players on the floor that can make the extra pass and share the ball. You can’t key in one guy. To stop that, it’s hard. And we played more as a team as the season went on.”