LOVERRO: Frederick Flying Cows provide fans old school basketball fun in new era

OPINION:

I went to a pro basketball playoff game Saturday night, and the tickets cost less than a napkin at Madison Square Garden.

Spike wasn’t sitting next to me. Neither was Ben Stiller nor any of the other celebrities who get airtime on broadcasts for showing up to watch the NBA product.

Then again, this was just basketball. And the lady behind me wearing a full onesie cow costume was having a lot more fun than Spike or Ben did watching Jalen Brunson play one-on-one and launching threes, or Karl-Anthony Towns slide in and out of consciousness on the court.

This was Frederick Flying Cows basketball, and it was as fun as I’ve had watching professional basketball in a decade.

The Flying Cows defeated the Reading Rebels 110-107 before a raucous, packed house at Woodsboro Bank Arena on the Hood College campus. The arena was filled with fans mooing and ringing their cowbells to support the basketball team that they’ve fallen in love with, players who have played small college ball and then pro ball in places such as Albania and Uruguay.

They may have NBA dreams, and maybe those dreams have passed them by. But they have found a home in Frederick, in the two-year-old professional basketball franchise that is part of The Basketball League, founded in 2018 with eight teams and has since expanded to 39 teams, including another local franchise, the Capital Seahawks out of Bowie, Maryland.

Granted, it was a small sample. But if you love basketball — when it was jazz, not the 48-minute bass drum solo the NBA 3-point shooting contest has become — the Flying Cows are old-school Dizzy Gillespie.

That is because of their coach, Ed Corporal, a 62-year-old basketball lifer with Maryland roots — he got his start with the Montgomery County Rec League and coached at Meade High School — who grew up around players such as Magic Johnson, Nate Archibald and his brother, NBA All-Star guard Otis Birdsong, when Corporal was a ballboy for the Kansas City Kings.

“I grew up in an era with that type of old-school basketball,” said Corporal, who counts NBA coaches Cotton Fitzsimmons and Pat Riley among his mentors. “I used to sit on the bench and learn and ask questions.”

They don’t abhor the 3-point shot — they hoisted up 24 of them in a win over Reading. But the average number of 3-point shots taken in an NBA game is 37.

The Flying Cows attack the rim and play the game from the inside out — not the perimeter 3-point shooting contest the NBA game has devolved into. “You’ll see everyone touches the ball,” he said. “We move it around. That’s what I grew up with, and I’ve been pretty successful in this league doing it.”

Yes, he has — in 2021 when coaching the Enid Outlaws in Oklahoma to a 30-3 record, Corporal was named league Coach of the Year. He came to Frederick last year and led the Flying Cows to a 20-4 record to win TBL’s Mid-Atlantic Division. They exited the playoffs in the first round but came back this season with a 21-3 mark and knocked Reading out of the playoffs last weekend. They face the Raleigh Firebirds on Friday night in the first game of the conference finals.

He has done all this while coming back from two massive strokes 10 years ago that nearly took his life. “I was in the hospital for about seven months,” Corporal said. “They didn’t think I was going to make it. But I was very driven, being a former athlete, and determined to come back.”

Corporal is joined on the bench in Frederick by former University of Maryland basketball great Derrick Lewis. Corporal also has some familiar faces on the bench — four of his players from that championship Oklahoma team followed him to Frederick. 

They led a team that played hard in the game I saw up close, and, according to the league’s website, players generally earn between $500 and $5,000 a month. Some play because they still hope to get a bigger shot elsewhere. “This way they are going to be seen by the right people if they perform well,” Lewis said. The league has had several players who have made it to the NBA.

A big part of the success in Frederick is because of the commitment to the fan experience by team owners Tony Mazlish and Michael Witt, two local entrepreneurs and basketball fans who sold their businesses and entered the world of minor league basketball.

“I think it’s fair to say it has surpassed any expectations we had,” Mazlish said. “The community has been extremely supportive and responsive from the very beginning.”

“We think there is a formula here to tap into these mid-sized and smaller markets that have the right demographics that would really embrace a product like the Flying Cows,” Witt said.

Both give a lot of credit to their general manager, Chris Jenkins, for building the brand that now appears to be grabbing Frederick like a dairy farmer grabbing a cow’s udder.

Moo, baby.

• Catch Thom Loverro on “The Kevin Sheehan Show” podcast.