Sophomore Micah Davis has helped lead Franklin’s late-season resurgence.
Sometimes what’s most instrumental in success is having the freedom to fail.
As a rookie head coach who struggled through much of his first winter back at his alma mater, Adrian Moss had it and appreciated it — so much so that when he was approached by the press after Franklin’s victory over Center Grove in the Class 4A sectional championship game, it was the first thing that came up.
Moss, whose Grizzly Cubs lost 14 of their first 20 games this season before righting the ship late and winning the school’s first sectional title since the coach was a player back in 2006, made it a point to thank principal Steve Ahaus, superintendent David Clendening, athletic director Bill Doty and assistant AD Chris Coll for their undying loyalty.
“(They) let me know the whole year that they had my back no matter what,” Moss said. “Even when we were down like crazy.”
And the Grizzly Cubs were definitely down. Like crazy.
Coming into the season with a great deal of buzz, they pulled out a season-opening win over Indian Creek but promptly lost six of their next seven before getting smacked around by Center Grove, 54-35, in the Johnson County tournament semifinals. After mid-February losses at Columbus East and Plainfield, Franklin was 6-14 and had been more or less left for dead by most outside observers.
The “nobody believes in us” motivational cliché gets worn out in sporting circles, but in Franklin’s case, it was probably true. Based on actual results, there wasn’t much reason for folks to believe in this team — but the coaches and players still believed in one another.
“I was pretty down, but I tried not to show that around my players,” Moss said. “We got a little humble pie. We put our chest out coming in, we’re doing all this — I call it the goofy stuff — and we forgot that we’ve got to grind and we’ve got to go out there and win games. We got a little humble pie in our face in the season, (but) I’m glad it happened early and not late.”
“The coaches always knew we had it in us, and we always knew we had it in us,” senior Sam Auger added. “We were just waiting for everything to finally click, and it finally did.”
On Feb. 21, in the penultimate game of the regular season, Franklin hosted a 15-6 Columbus North team that was then considered one of the top 20 or so teams in the state. Moss and the Grizzly Cubs switched to a four-guard lineup — Wyatt Nickleson, Carson Hunter, Micah Davis and Auger circling big man Tristan Coleman — and pulled off a 60-50 victory.
Davis, a sophomore who had 23 points, 13 rebounds and four steals in the win, believes that night was when Franklin started to pull itself together.
“That’s when it all happened,” Davis said. “Throughout the whole season, we just couldn’t find anything, but we’re all teammates and brothers, and we just came together and we figured it out.”
The Grizzly Cubs haven’t lost since. They closed the regular season with a 79-67 home win over a 14-win Jennings County team, then ran the table in the sectional — where they showed the ability to win those grind-it-out games that the December version of the team could not have survived.
Franklin started the season looking like it was auditioning for the old AND1 Mixtape Tour — a steady diet of alley-oops, deep heat-check 3s and behind-the-back passes matched by bad shots and unforced errors. It goes into regional weekend still alive because it grew up and figured out how to execute in the halfcourt when games got tight.
Staying the course was tough, and not everyone on the opening-night roster stuck around. The lineup that will take the floor for today’s regional final against Floyd Central bears little resemblance to the one that started early in the season, but it’s the lineup that works for these Grizzly Cubs.
How long it took to figure that out is of little concern now; all that matters is that it happened in time.
“We had … small problems that we had to take care of first,” Coleman said, “especially (since) this is coach Moss’ first year and it’s a lot of new players. We just had to take it one day at a time, and I guess we’ve got it now. A new team.”
New team or not, the Grizzly Cubs come into today’s game against the Hilltoppers as a significant underdog. Floyd Central is 10th statewide in the current Sagarin ratings; Franklin is 82nd, the second lowest ranking among the surviving 4A teams.
And yet there’s plenty of reason for optimism. The Hilltoppers needed double overtime to get past that same Jennings County team that Franklin beat by a dozen just four days earlier. The Grizzly Cubs, meanwhile, come in on a roll — and they’re led by a budding superstar in Davis, who took over in the second half of those big sectional upsets of the Warriors and Trojans.
Those performances led Center Grove coach Zach Hahn, who played in two NCAA Final Fours at Butler and knows about such things, to label Davis as “a special talent.”
While the sophomore guard has indeed shouldered a heavy load in big moments, averaging 19.8 points during the team’s current win streak, he certainly hasn’t been alone.
Every player in the Grizzly Cubs’ locker room today is there because they stood by Moss when times were tough — and they’re all reaping the rewards of their faith.
“I just kept reiterating the fact that we had enough talent in the room to get it done,” the coach said. “No matter who was out there, we had enough talent to get it done.
“I’m sure there was some doubt, but I don’t think there is any now.”
