Under coach Dick Harmening (top), Franklin had consecutive Trester Award for Mental Attitude winners — Garry Abplanalp (front) in 1973 and Don and Jon McGlocklin in 1974.
Submitted photo
Don McGlocklin recalls a time — he’s pretty sure it was during his sophomore season in 1971-72 — when Dick Harmening, then the boys basketball coach at Franklin, came into a team meeting sporting a state championship ring that he had earned as an assistant at Indianapolis Washington seven years earlier.
“He looked at all of us, and he told us, ‘You guys can do this. You guys can win a state championship and get a state championship ring,’” McGlocklin recalled. “I hadn’t put much thought into it. I thought we were a good team and a special team, but I never really thought about going and winning a state championship. He had that confidence in us, and he presented it to us that day.”
The Grizzly Cubs never quite reached the mountaintop, but they did reach the final four under Harmening in both 1973 and 1974, marking the most successful era in Franklin boys basketball since the Wonder Five won their last title in 1922.
Today, several of Harmening’s former players, and others associated with his teams, will gather at Hillview Country Club to honor the coach and reminisce about the golden years.
The reunion was the brainchild of 1974 graduate Ed Trogdon, who came up with the idea while on a camping trip in the Pacific Northwest along with the families of Don McGlocklin and his twin brother Jon.
Trogdon began pursuing it in earnest shortly thereafter, and he made it a point to not only include Harmening’s former players but others who were involved at the time — managers, cheerleaders, trainers and the like. Nearly 70 of the 80 or so people invited are expected to attend.
Expanding the pool of invitees made sense for a few reasons. First, Trogdon wanted to salute the players from Harmening’s early teams — the guys that he and his classmates looked up to as middle schoolers.
“The reason I wanted to make it more inclusive was the influence those older athletes had on our group,” Trogdon said. “We had some really special people playing ball prior to us, and we always got to see them on Friday and Saturday nights.”
Inviting several non-players also falls in line with Harmening’s approach of making everyone feel like a part of the program.
“Coach Harmening was instrumental in starting what I would call pride in the community and a commonality of everybody being a part of the basketball community,” said 1973 graduate Garry Abplanalp, a three-year varsity player and the 1973 winner of the IHSAA’s Trester Award for Mental Attitude. “Not only parents, players, coaches, managers, cheerleaders, the student body, but even the businesses in the community, the teachers, the churches. Just about every facet of the community was drawn into his ability to be able to create excitement for the community and bring everybody together.”
Franklin was the first head coaching stop for Harmening, a 1954 Greenfield graduate who played college football and basketball at The Citadel. He won six sectional titles during his tenure there (1968-79) and later won four more as the coach at Center Grove (1984-92). Harmening was inducted into the Indiana Basketball Hall of Fame in 2002.
Though he won more than his share of games while coaching the Grizzly Cubs, it’s more the things he did leading up to those wins that has stuck with his former players. Showing off that state ring was just one example of him making others believe in themselves.
“Coach Harmening deserves a very, very large portion of the credit for us having those good teams,” Don McGlocklin said. “When we were freshmen and sophomores, coach Harmening had a lot of confidence in us and pushed us to excel.”
“It was his ability to get us to do better than what we actually thought we could do,” Abplanalp added.
Harmening got the community to believe, too. Franklin drew a sellout crowd for a January 1972 game against Seymour and then packed the gym again and again, for every home game through the 1974 sectional.
“It was an incredible time for Franklin High School, the Franklin Community,” Trogdon said. “They really got behind us and made a big difference.”
Today, dozens from that era will reunite to honor the biggest difference-maker of all.
“He coached some big-time athletes (at Washington),” Trogdon said of Harmening, “and then he comes to Franklin and takes a bunch of farm kids and does equally as well. So we have to give him a lot of credit. He was intense, he was dedicated to what he was doing. Loved to win; he just couldn’t stand losing. He had a big influence on a lot of people’s lives in terms of what they did after they went on from basketball.”
