Mike Armstrong, right, a Franklin assistant the last two seasons, takes the head coaching reins this winter.
Daily Journal file photo
What few questions that Mike Armstrong might have had about how good a team he was inheriting at Franklin got answered less than a week after he was officially hired.
The Grizzly Cubs were slated to play a pair of June games against Ben Davis and Plainfield, and they’d practiced together maybe three times before that under their new-but-not-new coach. Armstrong had served as a Franklin assistant for the past two seasons under Josh Sabol, but even he wasn’t sure what to expect after losing three of the team’s top six players.
Then he watched current group make 17 3-pointers and run a traditionally strong Ben Davis team out of the gym, and he remembered pretty quickly why he’d wanted this head coaching job so badly in the first place.
“I keep going back to this — we’re dealing with a group that has always won, and won a lot,” Armstrong said. “Our expectation is that we’re going to continue to win.”
That’s not just coach-speak; it’s very much a reflection of what these Grizzly Cub players have always believed. Sure, the 2022 Class 4A runner-ups graduated Ashlyn Traylor and Kuryn Brunson, the last two county players of the year, and bid adieu to sixth woman extraordinaire Adelyn Walker, who’s now playing her senior season at a prep school in Arizona. But the returning team is built around a core group of juniors who went their entire youth basketball careers without losing a game together.
They’re fully expecting to win, because they don’t know any other way.
“The players we lost were good, but the players that we have to replace them are still just as good,” junior Scarlett Kimbrell said. “We have our middle school team coming back together with the junior class, and we have a strong leader in Kyndell (Jochim), who’s our senior, so I think we’ll be good.”
“I feel like the whole group has been playing together so long that we know what to expect out of each other,” classmate Lauren Klem added. “As a team, we expect to win, so that’s what we’re going to try and do this season. Just keep it going.”
For all of the talent that the Grizzly Cubs lost, they’ve still got three third-year starters (Kimbrell, Klem and Erica Buening) as well as some others with meaningful varsity experience in Jochim and junior Brooklyn York. The cupboard is anything but bare.
Plus, the other players poised to step into bigger roles this winter are largely juniors who are more than familiar with how their more experienced teammates operate. So while this team might not be as heavy on big-name star power, it might have a bit more in terms of cohesiveness and chemistry.
“Those girls definitely helped with creating more open shots,” Klem said of the departed standouts, “but at the same time, I feel like we had something before high school, too, where everyone just knew — I don’t know how to explain it, because it’s just like, everyone knows exactly how each other plays.”
Armstrong doesn’t expect to make wholesale changes — who would after a 28-2 season that ended in the Class 4A state championship game? He does, however, foresee a slight stylistic shift on the offensive side of things after losing a trio of ball-dominant players in Brunson, Traylor and Walker.
Kimbrell and Klem saw their 3-point attempts cut nearly in half between their freshman and sophomore seasons; their shot volume figures to go back up considerably. This group will try to hang its hat on making a ton of shots and not turning the ball over.
“When you see us play this year, we’re going to play a lot more like we played two years ago than we played last year,” Armstrong said. “We’re going to have a bunch of kids who have played together for a long time, plus Kyndell, who fits in with that group really well. … This year we’ll play with a little bit more space, create space and try to hit shots. Not abandon the inside game, but we’ll probably take more 3s this year than we took a year ago.”
Unlike most teams, Franklin only played two games this summer — but those were enough to remind Armstrong why he wanted to stick around and coach this group.
“We kind of saw what we can be,” he said.
SCOUTING THE GRIZZLY CUBS
Coach: Mike Armstrong
Last season: 28-2; won Mid-State Conference, county, sectional, regional and semistate titles; lost to Noblesville in Class 4A state championship game
Key returnees: Kyndell Jochim, senior; Erica Buening, Scarlett Kimbrell, Lauren Klem and Brooklyn York, juniors
Top newcomers: Emily Fuqua, Addie Morris, Josie Rae Phillips, Sophie Rinehold and Emma Sappenfield, juniors
Outlook: After a surprise coaching change and the departure of three of last year’s top six players, some expect the Grizzly Cubs to fall off a bit from the level they’ve been at the last two seasons. Don’t be so sure, however — the core of this year’s team is a junior class that dominated its competition at every age level and quickly pushed Franklin from middling to elite as soon as it reached high school. Those girls are used to winning and don’t expect to stop now. Armstrong, a veteran who’s won 426 games in 34 seasons as a head coach, was on the bench the last two years and knows what he’s working with ain’t broken; don’t expect any major “fixes.” Things might look a little different on the court than they did a year ago, but don’t be surprised if the results are pretty similar.
