Seeds for Franklin’s success planted years ago

Even back in first and second grade, Lauren Klem was having the conversations with her father. She saw the large team pictures in the athletic concourse at Franklin Community High School — all of the state champions, from the Wonder Five on down — and was determined to get up there with her classmates.

“I feel like this is what we’ve been working for basically our whole life,” she said.

Tonight at Gainbridge Fieldhouse — a mere 20 days before the 1ooth anniversary of Franklin’s last state basketball championship — Klem and her Grizzly Cub teammates will try to cement their place alongside those legendary teams by beating Noblesville in the Class 4A title game.

On the surface, Franklin’s ascent into the upper echelon of Indiana girls basketball is a recent one. Prior to last season’s semistate run, the Grizzly Cubs hadn’t posted a winning record since 2012 and had gone since 2008 without a sectional championship.

But the seeds for this current run of success were planted well before last winter. Everything can be traced back nearly a decade — to the days when first-grader Erica Buening was smearing banana all over an iPad screen on her way to a travel tournament.

As Klem noted, this moment has been a lifetime in the making.

Great expectations

Klem and Buening have been teammates since first grade, when both played for Franklin’s third-grade team alongside current senior Kuryn Brunson. That group won the Indy Girls Hoop League Silver Division championship, the first of many trophies that nucleus wound up winning.

Brian Klem and Paul Buening were the coaches of that team — and even though their daughters were just 6 or 7 years old, they treated them as older players might be treated. Even back then, expectations in practice were high and accountability was critical.

“A lot of people feel like, ‘Oh, they’re just 8,’ or ‘they’re just 9,’” Brian Klem said, “and then that turns into ‘you’re just 10, you’re just 11.’ The next thing you know, they’re ‘just 13.’ So we just told them the way we wanted things done, and we expected a lot out of them, and they did it. They did it without question.

“They know that you expect things out of them, and over time, they expected it out of themselves.”

Following that IGHL tournament run nine years ago, Brian Klem consulted with former Franklin varsity coach Walt Raines, and it was decided that those first-grade girls who had played up against older competition should get back together with their own classmates and start building a team together.

So that’s what happened, and from second grade all the way up through middle school, that group — the current Grizzly Cub sophomore class — didn’t lose a single game together against their own age group, whether in the IGHL or with school teams. The only same-grade losses any of the girls took in that time came against one another; the Webb Elementary team featuring Lauren Klem, Josie Rae Phillips and Kennedy Urban ran the table against all of the other schools in town.

Once the girls all merged in middle school, it was game over for everybody else.

“The groundwork had been laid for so long that by the time we got to eighth grade, Paul and I would sometimes just sit on the side in chairs and we’d just talk, because they already knew the routine,” Brian Klem said. “They literally could run through a whole practice by themselves. If there was something we didn’t like, we might stop it at that point, but really, they just knew what to do and they did it really well.”

Off and running

With expectations set and a foundation laid, the legend of Franklin’s Class of 2024 started taking shape.

Gradually, more players came into the fold. Some could hack it, some couldn’t. Scarlett Kimbrell, who came aboard in third grade, was one of those who did.

“It was fun to fall into an organized system like that,” Kimbrell recalled. “There was a lot of structure, so I just knew what to do when I got there. They all helped me at practice to figure out the drills, and by the end of the first week I had it down.”

Brian Klem had strategically started coaching Franklin’s middle school team three years in advance so that he could be in place when Lauren and her classmates arrived. He coached Brunson for two years there, and while he says he adjusted his system somewhat during those seasons because Brunson was so individually dominant, the basic principles remained the same:

Move the ball. Seek out open shots. Force turnovers — but don’t you dare commit any of your own.

It sounds simple, but not a lot of basketball teams were playing that way eight years ago. Not until the middle of last decade, when the Golden State Warriors’ dynasty blossomed and efficiency became an NBA buzzword, did the idea of pace-and-space small ball go mainstream — and even then, there weren’t a lot of high school or college teams playing that way, never mind preteen girls.

Franklin did, and the results were mind-blowing. In seventh grade, the group played 21 games and won them by an average margin of 48.5 points; the only team to play those Grizzly Cubs closer than 20 points was the eighth-grade team from Center Grove Middle School Central, which invited Franklin’s seventh-graders over for a game and lost, 35-23.

Games were so routinely lopsided that season that athletic directors David Edens and Tony Harris reached an agreement for Franklin to send its B team to the regular-season game against Clark Pleasant. That class was so deep that the B team came and won anyway.

When the A team finally got a chance to play Clark Pleasant in the Mid-State Conference championship game, Brian Klem remembered that previous slight and took it somewhat personally.

The Grizzly Cubs’ long-standing rule — that once the margin got larger than 20 points in a game, it would take the full-court press off — was relaxed somewhat just that one time.

“I’m pretty sure I told (Lauren) before the game, ‘We’re going to 30 today,’” Brian Klem said. “So we got in one little jab.”

Franklin won, 77-7.

Things were equally ridiculous in eighth grade. Before the onset of the pandemic cut their season a bit short, the Grizzly Cubs went 22-0, outscored their opponents by an absurd average score of 62-13 and hit 220 3-point shots (10 per game), even though quarters lasted just six minutes and the second half was almost always played with a running clock. Perhaps most impressively, Franklin had a jaw-dropping assist-to-turnover ratio of 3.75 to 1.

Did all of those one-sided maulings ever cause the girls to feel bad? Surely some sense of compassion, pity, remorse? Anything?

Buening, Kimbrell and Lauren Klem all smiled as they replied in unison: “No.”

“They really have no souls,” Brian Klem said.

The bomb squad

As the girls matured, new wrinkles kept getting added to the formula. Around fifth or sixth grade, the one that wound up becoming the Class of 2024’s signature — the 3-point shot — got introduced.

During practices, girls would shoot from the elbow of the free throw line, and when the coaches felt like a player was hitting those at a high enough rate, she would get moved out beyond the arc.

One by one, the girls started earning the green light to let it fly from deep. Not everyone got clearance at the same time, but most of them remember at least something about the first one they hit during an actual game.

“I just remember that the first one I made was a bank,” Buening said.

Kimbrell was hesitant to move out to 3-point range as a sixth-grader — a quaint memory now that she’s knocked down 135 shots from long range in her two varsity seasons.

“Typical Scarlett didn’t think she could make a 3, and the next thing you know she’s making them all the time,” Brian Klem said.

The range gradually increased, too. During seven-minute shooting drills in middle school, players would go for two minutes from the 3-point line, then three feet behind that, then out to the volleyball court line.

So it wasn’t an accident that as soon as the current sophomores arrived at the high school level last season, Franklin immediately became the top 3-point shooting team in the entire country. Even this winter, with more of an emphasis on star seniors Brunson and Ashlyn Traylor driving to the basket, the Grizzly Cubs still rank in the top 15 nationally in made 3s per game (9.4).

Do the right thing

But while the 3-pointers have been the most noticeable feature with this sophomore nucleus, they’re not the most important. From a young age, Buening, Kimbrell, Klem and their classmates just figured out how to play the game the right way — to seek out the best shots, to make the right pass, to be in the right spot defensively, so that even when those 3s weren’t falling, the Grizzly Cubs could still find other ways to win.

That became second nature pretty early in the process.

“We didn’t really allow for any turnovers in practice,” Brian Klem said, eliciting laughter from the girls. “To see them in a game, any of these three, or really any of our other (sophomores), turning the ball over, it’s surprising when it happens. Everybody turns it over some, but they were just always good about never turning it over, and we put a high value on that.”

The tricky part, of course, was instilling that idea that turnovers won’t be tolerated but doing it in a way that didn’t cause the girls to play tight and tentative basketball. This Franklin group achieved that by torturing one another in practices so that the games felt easy by comparison.

“I would just be having a good practice,” Kimbrell remembered, “and then scrimmage time would come and (Brian) would make Erica face-guard me, hold on to my jersey — she couldn’t let go of my jersey the whole scrimmage. I couldn’t even catch the ball.”

“What am I going to do, let Scarlett stand out on the wing and bomb 3s?” Brian Klem offered in self-defense. “Let’s get Scarlett annoyed, so when she comes in the game, it’s easy.”

Enjoying the journey

While the trip from first grade to the state championship game has been a long one marked by hard work, each of the girls built up fond memories along the way, with different ones sticking out for different players.

For Buening, it was that mess that she made on her iPad screen on the way to a first-grade tournament.

“It was everywhere,” she said after being reminded of her long-standing title as “the banana smasher.”

Lauren Klem remembers her father breaking a clipboard during halftime of their seventh-grade season opener — even though Franklin wound up beating Center Grove Central by 20.

“I really want that in there,” she insisted. “We’re up by 20 at halftime, and he still breaks the clipboard.”

Brian still has that fragmented clipboard, and he even pulled it out upon mention, just to re-enact the scene with a more positive spin that none of the girls seemed to agree with.

Lauren’s mother, Marcy Klem, harkened back to after one particular second-grade game, when an opposing coach approached Brian and asked, “How do you get them to run those plays? How do you get them to do that?”

“Brian’s like, ‘We practice. I tell them what to do, and they do it,’” she said. “For some reason people thought, ‘They’re just little girls; they can’t do all that,’ and he’s like, ‘No, they can. They’re smart. Just because they’re girls doesn’t mean they can’t do it.’ So that always stuck with me.”

As the girls have proven day in and day out since then, yes, they can do it.

This current Grizzly Cub team has obviously been bolstered significantly by Brunson, who was the Daily Journal’s Player of the Year last season, and the arrival of Traylor and Adelyn Walker from Martinsville this year. There’s no understating the importance of those players. But it’s almost impossible to imagine Franklin girls basketball in its current state without the deep and talented sophomore class and the core principles that group has adhered to for nearly a decade.

Credit for that can be spread all across the community.

“We were just lucky, really, to have a lot of great kids,” Brian Klem said of those elementary and middle school years. “Besides these three, you’ve got Josie Rae and Kennedy and Emma Sappenfield, Sophie (Rinehold), Emily (Fuqua), all right down the line. There’s not one of them that really dogged it in practice. And another thing that we were fortunate about was that the parents allowed their kids to be coached like that; that’s pretty rare.”

The end result is an extraordinarily rare team preparing to play on the state’s biggest stage.

Brian Klem has made it a habit this season to watch from a distance, often as far up in the bleachers as he can get. He won’t be anywhere near the Grizzly Cubs’ bench tonight — the varsity is Josh Sabol’s show to run — but Klem will be watching with a sense of deep gratification nonetheless.

“It’s great,” he said. “To see them have a chance to go up there on Saturday and win it all? It doesn’t get any better. There’s nothing I’d rather do than watch them play. … It’s a big deal.”

Then, turning to the three sophomore starters, he added: “Just don’t mess it up.”