Franklin’s Lauren Klem, left, tries to drive past Center Grove’s Ava Grant during Tuesday’s game.
Rob Baker | For the Daily Journal
Franklin basketball fans filed into Center Grove’s Vandermeer Gymnasium hoping to see one of the top-ranked teams in the state get knocked off.
Instead, they got to see their Grizzly Cubs take down two.
Franklin’s girls fell into an early 18-point hole but stormed back for a 62-53 road victory over the Class 4A No. 3 Trojans in the opening game of a coed doubleheader on Tuesday night, avenging an overtime loss in the final of the Johnson County tournament just 10 days earlier.
In the nightcap, Wyatt Nickleson hit a pair of foul shots with 13.9 seconds left in overtime to help Franklin’s boys pull off a wild 65-64 upset of third-ranked Center Grove.
“We’ve got a group of seniors that’s worked their butts off for this moment,” Grizzy Cub boys coach Adrian Moss said.
Franklin’s boys (2-1) squandered a six-point lead in the final three and a half minutes of regulation and trailed, 57-55, after Mike Ephraim opened the extra period with a basket. But Ryder Street hit a pair of clutch 3-pointers to shift the tide and help the Grizzly Cubs take a 63-59 lead with 45.4 seconds remaining.
Center Grove’s Joey Schmitz then cut it to one with a three-point play, and he followed up with a steal and an alley-oop to Peyton Byrd that gave the home side a 64-63 edge. Nickleson was fouled on the ensuing possession, though, and after his free throws from the line accounted for the 15th and final lead change of the contest, the Trojans (2-1) were unable to get a clean look at a possible winning shot.
“I don’t know if we’ve ever beaten a top-five team in school history in 4A,” Moss said. “Since I’ve been here, we haven’t done it. So I’m excited about that, but at the end of the day it’s the third game of the year. We love winning games, but that’s not the goal; we’ve got to get better, and we’re going to see those guys again, hopefully. If we win, then we’ll see those guys again somewhere down the road, and I know they’re going to be coming back for us.”
The start of the girls game went the exact opposite of how the county championship began, with the Trojans torching the Grizzly Cubs repeatedly during a 28-point first quarter. Audrey Annee hit a pair of early 3-pointers, Ava Grant knocked down two more in the final 1:20 and Lilly Bischoff scored nine points in between as Center Grove stormed out to a 22-4 advantage and remained ahead by 18 after the first eight minutes.
That proved to be the wake-up call that the Grizzly Cubs needed.
“Once we saw the score, we realized, ‘Oh my god, we’ve got to actually pick it up,’ and a switch just flipped,” said Franklin senior Lauren Klem, who had five of her six 3-pointers led her team with 22 points.
Franklin (8-2) turned up its defensive intensity at the beginning of the second quarter and used it to get back into the game, holding the Trojans to three points. Back-to-back post buckets from Erica Buening capped a 9-0 burst that chopped the deficit in half at 28-19 early in the quarter, and a Klem layup and two Brooklyn York free throws helped the visitors go into halftime down by just five, 31-26.
The visitors’ momentum spilled over into the third, when Klem tied the game at 31-31 on a 3-pointer at the 6:29 mark.
“We wanted to increase the pace of the game, get up and down the court a little bit,” Armstrong said. “Holding them to three (in the second quarter), getting ourselves back to a manageable deficit at halftime — and we had momentum. And then we were able to come out and get the first, I think, five points in the second half. Those were key moments in the game for us.”
Center Grove (7-1) scored the next five points to briefly go back on top, but the Grizzly Cubs answered with eight in a row to take the lead for the first time. Buening capped the run with a putback basket and a 3 from the left wing that put Franklin up, 39-36, with 2:55 left in the quarter. Klem’s third trey of the period stretched the Grizzly Cub lead to 44-38 going into the fourth.
“In these types of games, whenever you’re hitting like that, it just seems like you can just, whatever shot you take is just going in,” Klem said. “The fact that I have teammates boosting me up, too, during the game definitely helps.”
A 3-pointer from Grant, her sixth of the game, pulled the Trojans even at 49-49 with just over five and a half minutes remaining. Franklin again punched back, though, with Klem hitting a corner 3 and feeding York for one that got a shooter’s roll and dropped in to make it 55-49.
Grant’s driving layup with 2:35 to go cut the margin to four, but Buening answered back with a basket down low at the 1:52 mark and the visitors remained in control from there.
Buening finished with 17 points and six rebounds for Franklin, while Kimbrell added nine points, nine boards and four assists. Grant matched Klem’s 22 points to head up the Center Grove scoring, followed by Bischoff with 13, Annee with nine and Aubrie Booker with seven.
Klem said that avenging the county tournament loss was a motivating factor.
“Definitely the county, and still from the regional last year,” she said. “We still want to come back from that.”
The Trojans, meanwhile, will look to regroup after taking their first loss of the season.
“Obviously, it proves to you that any given night, with our schedule and the teams in the area, that anybody can beat you,” Center Grove coach Kevin Stuckmeyer said. “So you have to get back to work and you have to play game by game, you have to play quarter by quarter, you have to play possession by possession, and I think that was a good learning lesson for us to remind us that you have to do that.”
Franklin’s boys got 3-pointers from four different players in building a 19-14 lead early in the second quarter. Jalen Bundy led the Trojans back, scoring his team’s first nine points of the period and then finding Schmitz for a 3-pointer and a 26-24 lead with 3:39 left in the half. Center Grove went up by as many as five before a Street 3 and an and-one from Micah Davis briefly put the Grizzly Cubs back on top by one.
The two teams went into the break tied at 31-31 and remained close throughout the third period, with each side holding a four-point edge at one point before the quarter ended in a 41-41 deadlock.
After a Dylan Meador 3-pointer gave Center Grove a 44-43 lead, Davis responded with a 3 of his own at the other end that got Franklin the upper hand back for good, and he added consecutive baskets to stretch it to 50-45 with 4:09 remaining. Down six, the Trojans got back within a pair on a Will Spellman follow and a Bundy steal and layup. They had an opportunity to tie the game in the final minute, but Davis came up with a steal and then hit a free throw with 46.2 seconds left to make it a two-possession game.
Spellman hit a corner 3 with 16.6 seconds left to cut it to 55-53 and give the home crowd some hope, and the senior big man then dove on a loose ball to give the Trojans the ball back with 7.5 seconds on the clock. Schmitz then drove the lane and made a pullup through contact to tie it up, but his potential go-ahead free throw was off the mark, setting the stage for extra time.
Davis and Hunter finished with 18 points apiece for Franklin, while Street contributed 15 on five 3-pointers. Bundy scored 16 before fouling out for Center Grove, which also got 14 points from Spellman, 11 from Schmitz and nine each from Meador and Byrd.
