His father taught Kyle Flood how to get up for work in the morning.

The lesson serves him well now as the new Rutgers football coach, a job that requires 17 hours a day and would take all 24 if he let it. He waited a lifetime for this chance, so he is not about to rest after just four weeks.

Flood, at least, is doing what he always wanted to do. Jerry Flood Sr. never had that luxury. He was a sanitation worker, but those eight-hour shifts collecting trash in a Queens neighborhood were only part of the workday for a man who had three kids to support.

He fixed roofs. He built houses. He replaced carpets. He even had one job as a driller for Con Edison along the East River. “The guy I worked for was so cheap,” the father said, “that he tied barrels together and put a big piece of wood on it, and used that to send us out to the rig.”

He was a bartender. He was an ironworker. He was a snow-plow driver. He even had one job tying the steel wires on a construction site, working on wood planks 36 stories above the ground alongside recently paroled felons.

His wife Louise, the woman he met in a bowling alley when she was just 21 and he was fresh out of the Army, begged him to quit that one.

“You’ll make me a widow!” she said.

“It pays good money,” he replied.

He worked all those jobs to put his sons through Catholic schools, because he thought that education would help them have a better life than he did, and to support a daughter with special needs who needed around-the-clock attention.

Their house on 53rd Avenue in the Bayside neighborhood of Queens, the one with the tan aluminum siding and the rattling windows he spent $30,000 to buy in 1972, was cramped for a family of five. No one complained because the Floods always had what they needed.

And they had each other.

These are the people who shaped Kyle Flood, the ones who believed in him when the 41-year-old assistant unexpectedly replaced Greg Schiano as Rutgers football coach last month, the ones who supported him when he and his wife suffered the unthinkable loss of an infant son in 2010.

They’ll be the ones behind him now as the once-anonymous assistant coach becomes the face of the program. Because to understand Flood, you have to know his family.

• • •

His mother taught Kyle Flood to love football.

A girlfriend once asked Louise Flood how she handled those boring Sundays in the fall and winter. “Boring?” the mother responded. She had her Giants to keep her company. She had football.

She would place her sons on each side of her, and when her beloved team reached the end zone, she taught them to jump up and yell “touchdown!” It didn’t bother her that neither of the boys played the sport growing up — even the one she named after Kyle Rote, the Giants running back. No one in the family did.

That changed when Kyle enrolled at St. Francis Prep, a football powerhouse six blocks from their house, his freshman year. He marched into the kitchen and told his parents he was signing up for the team, and they replied with the same question.

You?

“Kyle had an aversion to getting hurt,” said Louise, who worked 26 years as a school secretary. “When he said he wanted to play football, I was surprised. But growing up in my house when I was a kid, if you didn’t watch sports, go do something else. Because I loved football.”

So did her son. That was clear from the beginning. He wasn’t a full-time starter on the offensive line at St. Francis until his senior year but was good enough to get recruited to Iona. He graduated with a degree in mathematics and, though he was just 22, landed what he thought was his dream job.

He was teaching math at St. Francis and assisting the school’s legendary coach, Vince O’Connor. Two years later, he had moved on to become a part-time assistant at nearby CW Post — “That was the big time, as far as I was concerned,” he said — when he got the phone call in 1997 that changed his life.

It was from Rob Spence, the man who recruited him at Iona. He was the offensive coordinator at Hofstra and wanted Flood to join his staff, but the job came with one condition: He’d have to quit his teaching job.

He sat with his parents at their dining room table and told them he’d have to leave a stable career to make just a $6,000 stipend with no benefits in a profession with no guarantees. He was 26 years old.

“What should I do?” he asked.

“What’s the worst that could happen, Kyle?” his mother responded. “You go back to teaching. Go for it!”

Within three months he was promoted to offensive line coach, and soon, teaching was a part of his past. He went from Hofstra to Delaware to Rutgers, from that $6,000 stipend to a five-year contract worth $4.75 million.

Along the way, his players became part of the extended Flood family. One Thanksgiving, when four Hofstra linemen couldn’t get home for the holiday, Louise Flood insisted they all come to the house.

She made two turkeys, 15 pounds of mashed potatoes, 6 pounds of stuffing and "a bunch of apple pies," serving the meal buffet style. They ate their meals in the same living room where Kyle had sat at her side, cheering for Giants' touchdowns at her instruction, every Sunday.

"My girlfriend says to me, 'You of all people, who loved football, in your wildest dreams did you ever think one of your kids would grow up to be a football coach?'" Louise said. "And I said, 'No. I wanted him to be an actuary!' "

• • •

His sister taught Kyle Flood what being a family means.

There were no summer vacations to Disney. Instead, the Floods would load up the car and drive to Ohio or Connecticut, where Kimberly was living in a care facility for the mentally handicapped.

Then, when Kimberly moved to a home on Long Island, weekends were dedicated to spending time with the youngest member of the family.

"It was never, 'We have to do these things because of your sister.' It was, 'This is your sister. Of course we're going to do this,' " Kyle Flood said. "That's how a family operates. I never saw it as a burden. We never felt like we wanted for anything because we had a handicap sister, that's for sure."

Kimberly was 1 year old when an ear infection led to a 107-degree fever and seizures. “We almost lost her,” Louise Flood said. “She turned blue and everything. We had to cool her in ice. She had seizures, and that was it.”

She suffered brain damage and, as a result, functions on the level of 7-year-old on her good days. She can feed herself but needs help getting dressed. She can walk around the neighborhood for hours, but never alone, because she doesn't understand the traffic signals.

She is 37 now and happy, but needs structure to thrive.

“She’ll never be able to live on her own,” Jerry Flood Sr. said.

So Kyle, four years older than his sister, helped however he could. That meant playing with her in the yard, or being patient with her when she wanted to be with him while he lifted weights in the basement, or building those summer vacations around a trip to visit her.

When the two brothers got married, Kimberly was in both of the wedding parties, smiling wide in all of the photos. She now lives at the Developmental Disabilities Institute on Long Island during the week, with her father picking her up every Friday to spend the weekends with the family.

“The boys suffered, watching their sister, taking care of her,” Jerry Flood Sr. said. “But I think it made them both better persons, having a sister like that.”

• • •

His brother taught Kyle Flood that his job is not life and death.

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Because, for his brother, that isn’t the case. Kyle remembers sitting in the football offices at Hofstra on Sept. 11, 2001, watching the second airliner crash into the World Trade Center, and wondering.

Is Jerry down there?

It would be hours before he knew for sure that he wasn't. Jerry Flood Jr. had just gotten off duty before the attacks and had headed home, but he was there after the towers fell — on that day and for the six months that followed, helping with the recovery and cleanup.

"We did everything we could to see if we could find somebody," he said. "Anybody."

He is an NYPD sergeant who works on the Emergency Services Unit, the city’s equivalent of a SWAT team, and that means any important job could become his job. He has worked on the security detail for the president and the pope (the latter handed him two rosary beads). He has apprehended and captured the most dangerous criminals in the city.

Jerry’s brother sums up the job description like this: “Essentially, if you’re a bad guy and the regular crew won’t get you, they call my brother’s crew, and they get you.”

Inside his Rutgers office, Kyle Flood points to a photo of that crew, his brother at the far left wearing a bulletproof vest and holding an automatic rifle. Jerry Flood Jr. knew he wanted to be on the Emergency Services Unit team before Kyle knew he wanted to be a head coach.

The brothers are just 18 months apart, close enough to be mistaken for twins when they were kids. And they were practically inseparable, sharing a 10-by-12 bedroom with the twin beds "barely a foot apart," Jerry said.

One dresser. One closet. One big mess. They were more like best friends, close enough to share an apartment again when Kyle followed Jerry, who played tennis, to Iona after high school.

Kyle went into coaching. Jerry went into police work. He needed seven years of special training, but the payoff was eventually running his own team. Now, after eight years in that role, he heads up the specialized training school for other cops who want to follow the same path.

"I got to do exactly what I wanted to do in life — not a lot of people get to say that," Jerry Flood Jr. said, knowing his brother is someone who can, too.

• • •

His second son taught Kyle Flood to value every second.

James Gerard Flood was born Aug. 12, 2010, with a diaphragmatic hernia, a condition that impairs lung development in the womb. Kyle and his wife Amy had known about the condition for months but were hopeful doctors could save their third child when he came into the world.

He died after just 12 hours.

“That day, as sad as it was, was also one of the greatest days of my life,” Kyle Flood said. “Because I got to spend a day with my son. The end of it wasn’t what I wanted, but I still got to spend a day with my son.”

The loss came weeks before his most difficult season in coaching, a 4-8 season in which his offensive line gave up an NCAA record 61 sacks. Flood leaned on his family for support.

“Things like that, I don’t know what else you rely on,” Flood said. “I definitely have a great support system here at work as well, but when you go through something like that, it definitely starts with family and faith.”

Flood was back in the hospital delivery room Friday, just 25 days after he took over at Rutgers, and there were no complications this time. Amy gave birth to Joseph, a healthy 8 pounds and 5 ounces, with big brother Kyle Jr., 9, and sister Isabella, 7, eager to help however they could.

Kyle’s grandparents had planned their visit for days, making sure they had the best route from their house in Bayside to the hospital. His aunt and uncle couldn’t wait to hold Joseph, either.

Joseph will learn this in a hurry as he grows up: For the Floods, family is everything.

Steve Politi: spoliti@starledger.com; twitter.com/StevePoliti

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