Editor's note: This story was originally posted on Jan. 31. It has been updated to reflect Brian Flores' new role as the defensive playcaller for the Patriots in 2018.

MINNEAPOLIS -- Brian Flores will be the next coaching star of the New England Patriots, and to understand why is to understand where he is from. He grew up in the housing projects of Brownsville, Brooklyn, maybe the toughest neighborhood in New York, so there was nothing about Bill Belichick or the Patriot Way that could ever shake him.

Life had roughed Flores up early, prepared him for full-contact drills inside the NFL's most demanding environment.

"I never backed down from anybody," Flores said. "If people see you're scared, or as somebody who backs down, you're going to deal with it every day. That was my thing. I didn't back down from anybody or any situation. Football, school, anything."

Long before the 36-year-old Flores became a Patriots scouting assistant in 2004, or the coach who will call the defensive plays for Belichick in 2018, he was the son of Honduran immigrants who lived with his four brothers 20 stories above a community that could be perilous to navigate. His younger twin brothers, Luis and Danny, each had knives pulled on them in separate mugging incidents on their way to the local video game store. Luis, now a fourth-grade teacher in the South Bronx, said he saw chalk outlines of bodies outside their building more than once, and that almost every night the Flores family heard the not-too-distant sound of gunfire.

Brian, the second-oldest, prefers not to offer the same details on similar confrontations. "I was tested many times," Flores said, "and I want to leave it at that." Flores knows what people often think about Brownsville and what journalists from far different places often write about Brownsville. He didn't need to read in a 2012 Time story that his neighborhood had the nation's highest concentration of public housing. He didn't need to read in a 2014 New York Times Magazine piece that there were 72 shootings and 15 murders the previous year "in an area spanning about two square miles that many people never leave."

Flores lived it every day. He lived amid the high poverty, crime and unemployment rates. And he loved his community all the same. "It shaped me in a lot of ways," he said. "It made me tough. I learned how to deal with adversity, and it motivated me to get out of there. ... It's a tough environment, and there's violence and drugs. But it wasn't the wild, wild West. There are a lot of good people there too. I was fortunate to be around a lot of them."

It takes a village, after all. "And it takes a big village when you come out of Brownsville," Flores said. His father, Raul, was a merchant marine who was out to sea as many as 10 months out of the year. His mother, Maria, stayed home to stand guard over the five boys, including the youngest, Christopher, who has autism. Maria ruled with two iron fists. Unless her sons were traveling to and from school or practice, or running an errand, they were expected to be off the streets and inside their three-bedroom apartment in the Glenmore Plaza projects.

"A bunch of our friends from middle school were in gangs," said Danny, now an equipment manager and graduate student at Columbia University, "and our parents didn't want us involved in that culture and lifestyle. I was leaving school once and saw a kid running for his life from a gang member. I went straight home. That's a hard thing to see when you're 13 years old."

On a beautiful fall day when Flores was 12 years old, his uncle Darrel Patterson stopped by the apartment to find the Flores boys watching TV. Maria didn't want them out of the building, but Patterson, a Jets fan and Brooklyn firefighter, had an idea. A cancer survivor, Patterson had been on medical leave on September 11, 2001, when he lost six colleagues from Ladder 118 at the World Trade Center. But football was Patterson's joy, and he told Maria he was going to load the boys into his car to drive them to a Queens park used by the Lynvet youth football league. A coach there timed Flores in the 40-yard dash and couldn't believe the kid's speed. He pointed Flores toward a parked van and told him to go inside and pick out the equipment he wanted to use. The young Flores put his first pair of shoulder pads on backwards, and the rest is football history in a basketball town.

Brian Flores was a two-way player at Poly Prep. Courtesy of Lance Bennett

Flores became a Lynvet prodigy as a defensive end and running back, and as an eighth grader, he was spotted by former NFL nose guard Dino Mangiero, who was coaching at Brooklyn's Poly Prep Country Day, a private high school attended by the children of New York elites. Flores was a grade-A student, and the school allowed Mangiero to admit a number of athletes from low-income backgrounds as part of its Jordan Scholars program. Before its campus was rocked by reports that a previous coach had sexually abused students between 1966 and 1991, Poly Prep was seen as an idyllic sanctuary in the affluent Dyker Heights section of Brooklyn. Flores and the younger brothers who followed him from P.S. 332 to Poly Prep, Danny and Luis, thought it was really something after a 90-minute commute by train and bus to see a pond full of ducks and a parking lot full of luxury cars. They were a long way from Brownsville in every literal and figurative way.

By his sophomore year, Flores was starting at tailback and safety for the varsity. Unbeaten Poly Prep was down big at halftime to a strong team from the Peddie School in Hightstown, New Jersey when Mangiero challenged his team to show its heart. On a fourth-and-1 near midfield in the second half, Mangiero had decided to punt before Flores, then a sophomore, started to plead his case during a timeout. Over his headset, Poly Prep assistant Craig Jacoby heard Flores tell the head coach: "Give me the ball. I'll get a first down." Flores ran through a tackle and scored a 51-yard touchdown in what would be a 38-38 tie. Jacoby said it was the only varsity game over Flores' three years that Poly Prep didn't win.

Flores scored a reported 1,140 on his SAT, and picked Boston College over a wide circle of major college programs offering him a full ride because of its academic standing and proximity to home. The BC coaches saw in Flores what the Poly Prep coaches saw: grit, intensity and, more than anything, humility. Flores redshirted his first year with the Eagles and eventually moved from safety to linebacker. Bill McGovern, now the New York Giants' linebackers coach, was Flores' position coach at BC, and he couldn't get over Flores' aptitude for the game and how quickly he applied a lesson from the meeting room to the field. McGovern would speak at clinics and use tape to support his teaching points, and over time he noticed something about his film clips: Flores kept showing up in them. His feet and eyes were always in the right places, and his technique and execution were all but ripped out of a textbook.

The 5-foot-11, 212-pound Flores was BC's second-leading tackler in 2003, and would have landed in an NFL camp if not for a torn quadriceps muscle that required surgery and knocked him out of the Eagles' bowl game. Flores had all the makings of a perfect Patriots player -- selfless, undersized, overlooked -- and suddenly he had to make himself a perfect Patriots staffer. Scott Pioli, vice president of player personnel, hired Flores as a gofer before later teaching him how to judge talent. Belichick taught Flores how to develop that talent once he transitioned from scouting to coaching in 2008.