Recent graduate Max Clark, right, is the most prominent among several recent success stories at Franklin.
Daily Journal file photo
Editor’s note: This is the second in a series taking stock of where each of Johnson County’s high school athletic departments stand heading into the 2023-24 school year. Today we take a look at Franklin, which is looking to build on some recent high-profile successes.
School was out at Franklin, but you wouldn’t know it from the crowd of cars parked on the southwest side of the high school by the athletic entrance.
On an early June morning, athletes from several different sports — football, volleyball, basketball and more — were on hand to take part in offseason training, with most of the action taking place in the school’s weight room.
That is, according to athletic director Bill Doty, the center of gravity for all of the success that the Grizzly Cubs have been enjoying in various sports over the last few years.
“The work that the kids have been putting in, in the offseason in the weight room, has been helping,” Doty said. “(Strength coach) Mike Hart in there; all the coaches have bought in. Everybody’s in there working hard, and even during the season they’re working hard. I think that’s paying off.”
Perhaps more now than ever before. Franklin won the Mid-State Conference’s boys, girls and combined all-sports championships in 2022-23 — the first time that Doty can remember the school claiming all three of those prizes. With the league enjoying as much statewide success as it ever has, that’s a pretty impressive distinction.
Franklin’s work in the weight room picked up with the arrival of both Hart and football coach Chris Coll, who also serves as Doty’s assistant athletic director. It’s been most noticeable on the gridiron, where former players such as Manny Cheam and Clayton Coll led the Grizzly Cubs’ drive to get stronger in the trenches half a decade ago. But it’s been happening across all sports — and it has also been starting earlier and earlier, with middle school AD Tony Harris implementing some strength training programs within his building.
“They’re not lifting 300 pounds and squatting all this big, heavy weight,” Doty said. “It’s more technique. They’re learning things at the seventh-, eighth-grade level, so that when they do come in as freshmen, they’re hitting the ground running and they’re doing things the right way. And they’re confident in the weight room; they don’t walk into the weight room and feel scared, feel anxious about being there. That’s probably been the biggest thing that we’ve been able to accomplish in the last five or six years.”
Doty says that the school has recently purchased more velocity-based training equipment for the weight room. That’s been one of several under-the-radar upgrades made in the past year, along with LED lighting at the swimming pool and replacing the old turf at the football field.
Those smaller improvements will likely have to do for now — because while Doty would love to make large-scale additions like indoor hitting facilities at the baseball and softball fields and artificial turf for those sports and soccer, he understands that such items are just pipe dreams in the short term.
“Everybody calls this the new high school still, but it’s 16 years old,” Doty said. “A lot of schools are adding things to their facilities, and it’s time for us to really be looking at turf and some of those other things that schools are putting in. With our debt service, though, I don’t know that that’s going to happen anytime soon — so our coaches have to be willing to understand that we do have nice facilities, and what we have is worth maintaining and taking care of.
“While it would be nice to have certain amenities, we can still create really good student-athletes and help build them and create that growth opportunity for them with what we have now. We’ve seen it; we know it can be done with what we have.”
Doty points to recently graduated seniors Max Clark (the top high school baseball player in the country and a probable top-five pick in the upcoming MLB draft) and Allie Lacy (who won multiple state medals in swimming) as examples of what can be accomplished with what’s currently available. The Grizzly Cubs made a run to the Class 4A girls basketball state final in 2022, and this spring brought four individual state track and field medalists as well as a girls tennis team that advanced to the state semifinals. Many of those athletes will still be around in 2023-24.
One of the biggest keys to Franklin’s recent successes, Doty adds, is a coaching staff that has enjoyed relatively little turnover during his six-year tenure. Those veteran coaches have been able to establish solid programs from the youth levels on up, and not surprisingly, that’s resulted in a lot of championships at the sectional level and beyond.
With such a strong foundation in place, the Grizzly Cubs should be able to sustain a winning culture in several sports.
“Having those coaches that do build relationships — the (swim coach) Zach DeWitts, the (tennis coach) Rusty Hugheses,” Doty said. “Those two guys, they get kids to come play their sport and are all in. We have a lot of good coaches that are building those relationships. Get the kids out at the youth levels, get the kids motivated and loving that sport, and then it just takes off from there.”
Where Franklin goes from here remains to be seen. The school does not appear primed for the type of enrollment boom being seen at Center Grove or Whiteland, and there won’t be any large-scale changes to the current facilities in the immediate future, but the Grizzly Cubs have proven they can do pretty well with what they’ve already got. The fifth-largest school in one of the state’s premier athletic conferences, they’ve consistently punched above their weight.
This next generation of Franklin athletes, Doty believes, can do the same thing.
“When they’re coming up as elementary school kids, they all have unlimited potential,” he said. “We saw that with Max. … Regardless of how many kids we have, if they understand what it takes to achieve their goals, then we’ll be competitive, regardless of whether we’re mid-pack or at the top of the enrollment. I think it’s more important to keep educating kids and parents (about) what it takes to achieve those goals.”
