AUBURN, Ala. – To those who know her best, it comes as no surprise that Terri Williams-Flournoy became a leader.
"My mom always said I was bossy," said Williams-Flournoy.
The unexpected aspect is the profession chosen by "Coach Flo," as she's known on the Plains.
Banking, not basketball, was her first stop after earning her degree in business management from Penn State.
Coach Flo never set out to make history, becoming the first African-American head coach at two Division I women's basketball programs, Georgetown and Auburn.
After graduating, Williams-Flournoy went home to Virginia Beach, Virginia, a management trainee at a bank.
But basketball was never far away. As a senior at Penn State, Williams-Flournoy helped the Nittany Lions earn a No. 1 ranking. In summers during college, she worked camps at Georgetown and in her home state of Virginia.
When Georgetown women's coach Pat Knapp offered a position as an assistant coach, Flo said no.
"I just got yelled at for four years by [Penn State women's basketball head coach] Rene [Portland], why would I want to coach?"
Undeterred, Knapp called Terri's brother, Boo Williams, whose legendary Virginia AAU program developed Alonzo Mourning and Allen Iverson. While working at the bank, Williams-Flournoy helped her brother coach the 16-and-under AAU girls' team.
Coach Flo's mom and brother employed a strategy that would eventually characterize Williams-Flournoy's teams: a double-teaming full-court press.
"It was fun and it was something I just never thought about doing," Williams-Flournoy remembered. "But when your mom says do it then you do it. Why not? You played it and you loved it. Why wouldn't you just want to go coach? So that's what I did. They made the decision that was the best thing for me."
At Georgetown, Williams-Flournoy found a mentor in John Thompson Jr., the national champion coach of the Hoyas' men's team and Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame member.
"Scared to death," Coach Flo said of her early interactions with the 6-10 Thompson. "He knew my brother Boo because he recruited my brother's players. Once you're in the Thompsons' family, you're in, and so I was like family."
Eager to learn, Williams-Flournoy attended Thompson's practices, learning from the legend, and his assistant coach Mike Riley.
"She is a great coach because of her willingness to continue to learn and improve and be a better coach each and every day," said Riley, now the head coach at the University of the District of Columbia.
"They took me underneath their wings and taught me so much," she said. "I got to learn so much from them in a different style of play. Men's basketball is totally different. They say that's where I get all of my aggressiveness from, from my mentors being men."
When Thompson consented to let Coach Flo observe his practices, he told the young coach he spoke only two languages.
"English and profanity," she said, smiling at the memory. "It was amazing to watch him."
"I thought she was special because she knew how to balance the coaching aspect of the game and still maintain a consideration and concern for the people she worked with," Thompson said. "The other thing I always respected about her was the fact that she was always asking questions to try to improve herself."
I can tell you, if my daughter were young, there's nobody that I would want to teach her any more than I would want Terri.
John Thompson, Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame, Class of 1999
After 12 seasons as an assistant coach, at Georgetown, Georgia and Southwest Missouri State, Williams-Flournoy accepted her first head coaching position at Georgetown in 2004.
"When the job opened, they contacted me," she said. "It was like going back home. An unbelievable opportunity."
By then, John Thompson III coached Georgetown's men's team, but his famous father was still a fixture on campus, watching her games from his chair in the corner of McDonough Memorial Gymnasium.
Thompson kept his observations to himself, unless Coach Flo asked.
"I asked. Why not?" she said. "What better person to learn from? It wasn't just basketball, it was how to be a head coach. How do you get to your players? So many questions. It wasn't always the X's and O's."
"She was always trying to learn," Thompson said. "That's a good sign."
Williams-Flournoy became the sixth women's basketball head coach at Georgetown, the first African-American.
"When you are first doing it you don't think about it," she said. "You just see it as your first head coaching job. After a while you realize, 'Oh, wow, there is no one who looks like me who has ever coached here before.'
"Then you just feel good about yourself because you are now a mentor for everyone else. You're now a role model for every black female that wants to be a head coach at an institution or university that has never had one before. It's possible and it can happen."
No one better understood the challenges that accompanied that opportunity than Thompson, who 20 years earlier became the first African-American head coach to win a D-I national championship.
"It's a burden, when you have a black woman being the very first, there are certain things that other people have to get acclimated to with her," Thompson said. "I think she's a person who is very capable of assisting that with them without being belligerent."
Williams-Flournoy built a winning program at Georgetown, winning 20 or more games in each of her final four seasons, but after eight years of commuting an hour each morning and evening, she searched for a job that would allow her to balance the demands of coaching and raising a family.
"Getting my kids ready for school and then maybe I could get back home before they went to bed," she said. "I'm raising everybody else's daughter, but who's raising my daughter?"
On April 2, 2012, Coach Flo became Auburn's head coach, the sixth in program history, a job that allowed her to attend daughter Maya's dance recitals and eat lunch at school with her son E.J. while competing in the SEC.
"They didn't only embrace me into the Auburn family, but they embraced my whole family," she said. "It was actually great to be able to come here and I got to be mom as well."
As she had done at Georgetown, Williams-Flournoy broke new ground at Auburn, becoming the first African-American women's head basketball coach.
"Once you get in, you're like, 'Oh, wow. I've done it twice,'" she said. "This is truly amazing. It's not so much for me, it's for the people that are behind me, that see it as being able to be done. It can happen. Now I've opened the door for someone else to do it as well. I also look back and say, 'Who did I help along the way?'"
Now, after 27 years in the profession, including 15 as a head coach, Williams-Flournoy embraces her role as a mentor, just as Thompson and Riley did for her.
"As you get older, you realize this is a whole lot more than just winning," she said. "These are young African-American students who were once you one day. I really have a huge role to not just be their coach, but coach them through life.
"Why not teach them something great along the way? Here at Auburn we started teaching on how to be excellent. Be an excellent person. Do something for someone else, it's not about you. My mom would probably be looking at me like, 'What are you doing if you are not helping someone else?' Someone did the exact same thing for me, so you have to do it."
Coach Flo long ago left banking for basketball, but she still practices the principles of investing, one student-athlete at a time.
"I can tell you, if my daughter were young, there's nobody that I would want to teach her any more than I would want Terri," said Thompson, the Hall of Fame coach. "Just based on what she represented as a woman, as a coach, as a person and as a teacher."
Jeff Shearer is a Senior Writer at AuburnTigers.com. Follow him on Twitter: @jeff_shearer