Three athletes have forever etched their names into Panther history.
For Jonah Brant, Ken Modlin and Garrett Young, Franklin’s winter sports season was one to remember, culminating with 5A state titles in three different sports. Recently, all three Panthers recounted their respective campaigns, listed below in alphabetical order.
Jonah Brant
For the past four years, Jonah Brant has been part of an exclusive club, as one of just a handful of competitive divers across the state. As the reigning 5A men’s 1-meter dive champion, the senior brought his career to a fitting end last month.
“I first got into it the summer before my freshman year. My coach asked me to do it because he heard I did gymnastics, so he was like, ‘OK, this kid would probably be good at diving,’” said Brant of longtime Panther head coach Dwain Picou. “So he and I went over to the Sylva outdoor pool during the summer, and we practiced there before high school started.”
Already a standout swimmer for Franklin’s middle school and amateur teams, Brant began splitting time between underwater and midair, expanding his repertoire to give FHS a competitive edge. With no suitable diving board nearby however, practicing was not an easy task.
“We’d leave practice pretty early, like 30 minutes before practice ended, and it would take us like an hour and a half to get to Asheville. Right. We would just talk, have fun, tell jokes to each other,” said Brant. “We went to Asheville Mondays and Wednesdays and usually to Sylva Tuesdays and Thursdays, so we would switch it out. … [It was] very tough. Sure, the drives were long and we wouldn’t get back until like 10 o’clock, but they were pretty fun.”
Despite many hours and miles on the road, Brant continued working on his craft, spending years as the sole competitive diver west of Asheville. Drawing on Picou’s many decades of knowledge, he soon built up an impressive array of dives.
“I have maybe 40 dives in total, but I only choose 11 to do for the meet. I do the dives that get me the most points from the judges,” he said of competitive meets, which typically include 11 rounds. “Coach Dwain taught me all of them; he told me what to do and how to do them.”
“[The inward half-twist] is my favorite; the first time I did it, I did it on accident. I talked to coach about it, and he was like, ‘Yeah, that counts as a dive.’ It’s so unique that all the judges had no idea how to judge it.”
Between easy dives that earn less points and more difficult, high-stakes leaps, Brant quickly became one of the state’s best, placing third at the 3A state meet as a freshman, fourth as a sophomore and second as a junior. In Franklin’s first year under the new 5A classification, he finally reached the mountaintop as a senior.
“It was awesome. I was just happy,” he said of winning gold. “I was proud of myself – I was happy that I came such a long way.”
Earning gold in the 1-meter dive and helping Franklin’s relays to top-12 finishes, Brant helped the Panther men place sixth at last month’s state meet. As part of a tight-knit community across the state, the senior hopes to continue to the next level.
“Every time we go to a meet together like regionals or state, we always hang out and talk to each other because we’re the only divers in the state, and we’re all like best friends, too,” he said. “I plan to try to go to a college with aviation, and also a diving team or club.”
Ken Modlin
The eldest son of a family of runners, Ken Modlin has the sport in his DNA. As this year’s 5A men’s 500-meter dash champion, his path has taken a circuitous route.
“I started doing club track back when I was in first grade, but I didn’t really start taking it seriously until my freshman year,” he said.
In just two years since recommitting to the sport, Modlin’s rise into its top ranks has been meteoric. With a comprehensive workout plan, he’s taken the classification by storm.
“I’m mostly a sprinter, but I think that training the longer distances helps me build a base that carries on throughout the entire track season, because cross country is in the fall and the track season doesn’t start until the winter,” he said. “So it really just helps with my stamina, I’d say, and even though I’m training the longer distances, I’m still doing weight room lifts and building muscle. So, it’s split between the longer distances and sprint training, and then now since we’re in track season I’m just doing sprint training 100% of the time. … My range is bigger because I can run a wider range of events compared to a person that only does the short sprints – I can do mid-distance as well.”
Competing for Panther cross country in the fall, Modlin builds endurance that few 5A sprinters can match, running five kilometers at a clip over rough terrain. With the speed of a sprinter and the stamina of a distance runner, the junior is perfectly suited to the middle-distance events.
“I’d say the 500 is my favorite event during indoor. … It’s my best event,” he said. “I can always push until the end of the race, and even though I’m not the greatest at the really, really short sprint events, I always find a way to push through to the end in the longer ones. So, I think that really helps because it’s kind of just mental once you get to the longer sprints.”
Throughout the winter indoor season, Modlin produced some of 5A’s best 500 times, qualifying for the state meet as one of its favorites in the event. In Winston-Salem however, he was dealt an unexpected setback.
“The week leading up to it, I expected to win – I was confident in myself winning,” he said. “And then the day of the track meet when I woke up, I think I had a fever or something. After my first event, which was the [4x200-meter relay], I threw up for like five minutes. After that I wasn’t confident, but once the race came up, I just ran.”
At the biggest meet of the season Modlin pushed himself to the limit, helping his relay teammates to a third-place, school-record finish. In the 500, months of endurance training overcame his sudden illness, helping the Panthers become 5A state runners-up.
“I was back in fourth place for about half the race, and then for the second half of the race I just found another gear, and I picked it up and passed everyone,” he said. “I couldn’t really believe it at first because I was just in shock, and I felt bad as well because of my fever. … [After the race] I was pale, and Reid [Laseter] was telling me I was really white – I was just not feeling too well. … I just didn’t focus on any of that; I just focused on finishing the race and winning.”
Garrett Young
The crown prince of Panther football’s royal family, Garrett Young lived up to his name last fall, earning All-State Two-Way First Team honors from HighSchoolOT. As a 5A men’s state wrestling champion however, he saved perhaps his best work for the mat this winter.
“I started when I was six years old at Rabun Gap, and probably two years in I ended up taking a break,” he said. “I started playing basketball in community league, and I thought about playing middle school, then I decided to go back and start wrestling back up in sixth grade, and that’s when I really started hitting it pretty hard.”
Since recommitting to wrestling, Young has been one of the region’s best, winning Blue Ridge Athletic Conference titles in his sixth- and eighth-grade years (his seventh-grade year was cut short by a broken ankle). After becoming Franklin’s first-ever freshman to compete at the state meet last year, he set his sights on the Panthers’ first-ever state title.
“I was the last seed going into state last year, and I ended up pinning the first seed, so I had a big jump,” he said of the 215-lb. weight class. “I ended up losing to the next kid … so this year I came in thinking, ‘I’ve got it, it’s a straight shot, it’s how much work I really want to put in,’ and so I started really putting in work. I was barely conditioned going into it and started building it up, and that was the biggest thing. Coach [Jimmy Barnett] helped me big-time with that, and I really started just getting with it. I’ve been going to these camps over in Georgia, wrestling with the best of the best that kick my tail every day, and started getting better.”
With help from Barnett and Roundtree Wrestling in Hoschton, Georgia, Young threw himself into his craft this offseason, working on his technique and physical fitness. During the season his work paid off, helping him finish with a record of 44-2. At regionals and state he won his first six matches without conceding a point, setting up a showdown with Hunt High School’s Judah Harris in the state final.
“I walked out and looked at all the people, and it kind of made my knees shake a little bit because there were so many people,” said Young of the championship match in the Greensboro Coliseum. “I locked up on him, and I knew he was strong, but I kind of played it smart, and I just thought about what coach Jimmy said about ‘One point will win the match,’ So I used that, and I pushed myself, and I just pushed the pace. I didn’t really do anything dumb.”
Versus Harris, a member of the U.S.A. Judo Cadet Team, Young took an early lead and never looked back, going on to win the match 4-3. A state champion as a sophomore, Young should continue to contend for years to come.
“I’ve never done that before, and you always want to get that feeling in anything. You want to feel like you put in that work, and it showed,” he said. “I was dead tired, but after he [the referee] raised my hand, it was just the best feeling ever. I didn’t know what to do – everybody was celebrating, but I didn’t even [join in]. My goal was to win, and after that I didn’t know what I was going to do. It felt amazing, and I was looking up at all my supporters that came along … it all just felt very, very good.”