After a 30-year absence, basketball finally returned to Franklin High School for the Golden Tornadoes’ Division IV opening night double-header against Mount Royal in their renovated gym on Friday night in front of a packed house. 

Both the girls’ and boys’ teams have been trending upward in recent seasons and started off the 2024-25 campaign with a pair of dominant wins over the Mount Royal Academy Knights.

Girls: Franklin 47, Mount Royal 32 

The Tornadoes girls’ basketball team gave its fans plenty to celebrate right from the opening tip, taking a lead in the first quarter and never giving it up to make Franklin’s first game on its new court a W.

Franklin has steadily improved over the past three years and have turned into a competitive team in the division, achieving playoff berths the past two seasons after an eight-year drought and are trying to continue that streak this season.

Cat Robbins is the new head coach for the girls’ team this year, although, she’s not completely new and was already familiar with the squad from coaching in the middle school before taking the varsity job. 

Sophomore Kourtney Kaplan – last year’s leading scorer in Division IV as a freshman – led her team in scoring with 19 points and was all over the court despite being double-teamed by the Knights’ defense.

“She’s always someone we can lean on and someone who I always want to be in the game because she’s just a natural-born leader. She always knows how to lift her teammates up,” Robbins said about Kaplan’s performance. “Gets those steals when we need them. And she is such a good facilitator, she gets everyone involved.”

She had a solid first half, scoring 10 of Franklin’s 22 points, and could not be stopped when driving into the paint. She was good defensively and created turnovers for fast break points. Once one of Mount Royal’s assigned defenders on Kaplan got into foul trouble in the fourth quarter, she was unstoppable and added eight more points to her tally.

“Honestly, when we were doing our game plan, it was working well in the first two quarters, and then unfortunately, one of those primary defenders happened to get in foul trouble but she’s gonna get that treatment all year,” said Knights head coach Derek Tremblay on defending Kaplan.

The Knights had a significantly younger and smaller team compared to the Tornadoes, with two freshmen and four middle school players out of the seven total players on the roster. Yet, they gave Franklin trouble at times and were only trailing by eight points, 22-14, at the half.

“It feels pretty good working as a team, getting the points up, playing good defense and talking, which we need to do more talking, but still did good,” said Kaplan. “We need to keep our heads up because we started to get down on ourselves, and we started to get frustrated with each other. So at halftime, we got in the locker room and we were saying we got to get it together.”

The Tornadoes used their athleticism and size to their advantage to drive and get second-chance points in the paint. Their centers, junior Maddie Doherty and sophomore Lily Cornell earned tough rebounds and both scored seven points respectively. 

Senior Savaughna Slocum also had a good night on the boards and had a few steals throughout the game to round out the good overall performance and get the win.

The only issue the Golden Tornadoes ran into was foul trouble because of the Knights’ quickness and full-court press to stagnate their offense, which is something Robbins stressed they need to improve.

“Little things, boxing out on defense, getting the rebounds on offense for second-chance points, running through our offense with little turnovers and working on our foul trouble, because that’s something that we need to work on,” said Robbins.

Boys: Franklin 64, Mount Royal 31

The Golden Tornadoes varsity boys’ looked nearly perfect in the first quarter of opening night. It seemed like every shot they took went in and their defense was spectacular. 

They outscored the Knights 28-3 in the first quarter and nearly shut them out until Mount Royal finally hit a 3 with 24 seconds remaining.

“We told them right from the beginning that we needed to come out and have that up-tempo, especially on defense. We’re going to be successful if we can have our defense create offense for us,” said head coach David Bedard.

The hot streak was started with two easy buckets by senior forward, Harrison Kaplan, Kourtney Kaplan’s older brother, and continued by junior guard Nate Holmes with an electrifying 11 first-quarter points.

“I think we shared the ball pretty well. Obviously, our defense in the first quarter was really good, especially the press rattled them a lot,” Harrison Kaplan said.

After the strong start, Bedard was able to cycle through his bench and provide some minutes to younger players on the team. The overall performance was very strong, the Tornadoes got tough buckets and easy open shots because of their efficient ball movement and stellar defense to create fast break points.

“If we can improve in the half-court defense, improve on the help, improve on the communication, we’ll be pretty good,” said Bedard.

Kaplan and Holmes led their team in scoring with 15 points apiece and were glad to do so on opening night. Kaplan said he enjoyed finally playing on the new court and was proud to be part of Franklin basketball history in the building. 

“They got a lot of soul-searching to do over the weekend. I’ve seen it many times in the past. It’s a tough, tough thing for us to come into this kind of a gym, their opening night. But they should have been ready, that’s partly on me,” said the Knights’ head coach Brandon Crummer.

Ultimately, the Golden Tornadoes comfortably sealed the game in a spectacular opening night for Franklin basketball, which, for now, is undefeated on its new court.

Franklin’s next games are also at home. The Tornadoes host Moultonborough in a doubleheader on Tuesday.

Alexander Rapp can be reached at arapp@cmonitor.com