Senior Lauren Klem has cut down her fair share of nets during her Franklin career and hopes to add more to her collection this winter.
Daily Journal file photo
Most girls basketball players in Indiana would be happy with an 18-win season and a sectional championship, but Lauren Klem isn’t most people.
“We definitely were not satisfied by last year at all,” the Franklin senior said. “Like, at all.”
Klem and her classmates had been used to dominating the competition for their entire basketball-playing lives; the Grizzly Cubs reached the Class 4A semistate in 2021 and were state runner-ups in 2022, posting a combined 50-5 record. So going 18-6 and ending the season with an overtime regional loss to Center Grove — the first time this group had ever tasted defeat against the Trojans — did not sit well.
The expectation inside the Franklin gym is that this last season together will end differently.
“We’ve talked about it a bunch at practice, just us girls,” Klem said. “Getting our mindset together on one page about what we want to accomplish this season. We’re just more focused on that than we were any other season.”
As freshmen, Klem and fellow rookie starter Scarlett Kimbrell led the way as the Grizzly Cubs hit an incredible 298 3-point shots, leading the nation with 11.9 long-distance makes per game. Franklin still made 278 3s in 30 games during the 2021-22 campaign and 209 in 24 games last winter, but the downward trends in volume and percentage are something that Klem would like to see reversed.
Picking the tempo back up, she says, should help — and that’s something that she and her teammates have been trying to do this preseason.
“We have started, in practice, working on more up and down stuff, getting the pace moving,” Klem said. “Definitely trying to go back to that type of play. … I think to be successful, we have to be a team that pushes the pace.”
Any efforts to ramp the speed up begin with Klem, a three-time All-County performer who has been in the starting lineup since making her varsity debut in an overtime win at Mt. Vernon three years ago. Her numbers don’t jump off of the page — she’s averaged 7.4 points over her career and won’t sniff 1,000 points or any such milestones — but she’s always done the little things that coaches appreciate.
Listed at 5-foot-2, Klem was the Grizzly Cubs’ leading offensive rebounder as a junior. She also paced the team in assists and steals, and despite being the primary ballhandler she’s only committed 63 turnovers in three years — fewer than one per game.
“She’s extremely important,” Franklin coach Mike Armstrong said. “I think that she’s an Indiana All-Star caliber player that maybe is sometimes overlooked because she doesn’t have these great individual stats, but she is clearly one of the best players I have coached — and I’ve been fortunate enough to coach a lot of really good players, including on this same team. But she’s kind of the glue that holds everything together.
“She understands the game. She doesn’t make a lot of mistakes — which is huge in girls basketball — and she’s a very intuitive, smart player.”
Klem doesn’t sweat the relative lack of individual accolades. She did, however, notice that the state’s preseason coaches poll did not include the Grizzly Cubs in the top 20.
(Center Grove is 11th and Indian Creek 16th.)
“We’ll take that, and we’ll see what we can do with that,” Klem said.
Franklin’s senior core, particularly returning starters Klem, Kimbrell, Erica Buening and Brooklyn York, has won a ton of basketball games together; the plan is to win a lot more in their final run together.
“It’s obviously a highly touted group,” Armstrong said. “Has been all the way through — youth basketball, middle school basketball, high school basketball. I think that they want to go out on the highest note that they can go out on, and I think they’re going to be pretty committed to what’s going on and what we want to get done this year.”
SCOUTING THE GRIZZLY CUBS
Coach: Mike Armstrong
Last season: 18-6, lost to Center Grove in Class 4A regional
Key returnees: Erica Buening, Emily Fuqua, Scarlett Kimbrell, Lauren Klem, Josie Rae Phillips, Emma Sappenfield and Brooklyn York, seniors; Aubrey Runyon and Maggie Doty, juniors
Top newcomer: Kennedy Urban, senior
Outlook: It says a lot about what the current senior class has accomplished in its time together that an 18-win season and a sectional championship qualify as a disappointment, but this group of seniors had been a juggernaut from elementary school on — and they’re determined to go out looking like one again. Klem, Kimbrell and Buening have been starters since their freshman year, and York has been a mainstay in the paint the last couple of seasons. Sappenfield is likely to see more time in her final season, and the return of Urban, who sat out last winter to focus on volleyball, should add some much-needed help in the backcourt. Franklin won’t be particularly deep, maybe only using six or seven players some nights, but there’s enough talent and experience among the core seniors to carry this team a long way.
