Their middle school games were the stuff of legend. Lopsided scores. Stranger-than-fiction stat lines. Steph Curry shooting range.
Franklin’s girls basketball freshman class arrived with a ton of fanfare, but also a lot of questions. How many of the players from that juggernaut would make the varsity? How would their skills translate against older, bigger and more seasoned players? How would the Grizzly Cub upperclassmen react to the prospect of reduced minutes?
So far, the answers have all been good; the influx of ninth-grade talent has helped Franklin win its first 10 games by an average of about 30 points apiece. Half a dozen freshmen have gotten varsity minutes at some point, but it has been the sweet-shooting duo of Scarlett Kimbrell and Lauren Klem that has truly unlocked the cheat codes for this unbeaten squad that has embraced the ideals of the modern NBA game — maximize possessions, put up a ton of shots from high-efficiency spots and make as many of them as possible.
Both freshmen are comfortable from shooting well beyond the 3-point arc, and they’re cashing in at a pretty good rate. Heading into today’s game at Perry Meridian, the Grizzly Cubs have made more 3s than any team in the nation, according to MaxPreps — and Klem (38 for 90, 42.2%) and Kimbrell (31 for 87, 35.6%) are responsible for more than half of those.
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Click here to purchase photos from this galleryTheir range has been a game-changer for Franklin.
"It definitely opens up a lot for me, or for my other teammates," said junior Kuryn Brunson, the team’s leading scorer at 18.4 per game. "Having them out on the 3-point line, people have to respect it — and if you don’t respect it, they’ll go off."
"It makes a huge difference," Franklin coach Josh Sabol added. "We talk about gravity all the time — drawing defenses further out from the basket, which allows Kuryn and Kyra Baker and some other girls to get to the basket, and it also allows our frontcourt players to operate a little bit more one on one in the paint. So just even the threat of them being out there opens up so much more on the inside for us."
That threat wasn’t built overnight; Kimbrell says that she and her classmates started learning to emphasize the 3-point shot back in elementary school, and they’ve leaned into it ever since. When the current freshmen were in seventh grade, they made 390 treys in 40 games, with Klem (171) and Kimbrell (93) combining for more than two-thirds of those.
The 3 is such an integral part of their game plan that neither Kimbrell nor Klem has attempted a free throw yet in a high school game. An astonishing 91% of their shot attempts have been from behind the arc.
"We’ve been shooting since we were in third grade," Kimbrell said. "A thousand shots a day, 100 made 3s, and it really pays off in the games."
Concerns about how well and how soon their game would translate to the varsity level were legitimate — especially in the case of Klem, who is generously listed at 5-foot-1. But it hasn’t been an issue so far; Klem and Kimbrell rank 1-2 on the Grizzly Cubs in minutes played, and they’re averaging 12.0 and 10.7 points, respectively, while also committing a total of just 12 turnovers in 577 combined minutes. They’ve more than held their own.
Both freshmen have been playing elite-level AAU ball for years with an Indiana Flight team that has regularly contended for national titles, so they were pretty confident that they’d be able to hang.
"I thought it was going to be hard, just with it being high school," Klem said, "but I think AAU, playing with all of those older girls, really helped us."
And having Kimbrell and Klem on board has undoubtedly helped the Grizzly Cubs, who cracked the top 10 in the Class 4A state rankings last week and have climbed all the way up to fifth in the Sagarin computer ratings. Sabol expected that would be the case — "I knew they were going to be ready," he said — but one never knows how veteran players will react when faced with the possibility of a reduced role, especially at the high school level.
According to Sabol, the process of integrating the freshmen into the program has been completely seamless, largely because of a high-character group of seniors hungry to win. Franklin hasn’t had a winning season since the 2011-12 team went 12-10; this year’s squad has a chance to be the school’s best since the state runner-up team of 1998, and the upperclassmen are determined to make that happen by any means.
"Our whole goal is just to win," Brunson said, "so nobody cares about playing time, nobody cares about their own stats. It’s how we can win as a team."
How much winning can this team do? Is it really possible for the Grizzly Cubs, who last won a sectional title in 2008, to make a run at a state championship?
Good luck convincing Kimbrell and Klem otherwise. These freshmen don’t really know what losing is like, and they’re not really interested in finding out.
"We hope to just keep winning," Kimbrell said. "If we play our game, we should win."
