‘Everybody here gets it.’ Franklin County girls basketball’s on a roll ahead of postseason.

A stunning upset in last season’s 11th Region semifinals broke a string of three straight region titles for Franklin County girls basketball.

But after a 66-46 senior night rout of No. 14 Ryle at home Thursday, the Flyers seem poised to reclaim the championship they’ve owned for six of the past nine years. Franklin County has won 17 of its last 18 games, including nine straight.

“We’re all positive with each other, and we play as a team. There’s not a selfish person on the team,” senior guard Rachel Shropshire said about the keys to this season’s success so far.

The Flyers (22-6) are ranked No. 7 in the latest Dave Cantrall Ratings and No. 12 in the most recent Kentucky Media Poll.

Shropshire, a 6-foot-1 Bellarmine commit who was honored during the game for recently reaching 1,000 career points, scored 12, all on 3-pointers, against Ryle and was one of three players in double figures for Franklin County. Leia Hogan and Makiyia Wheeler added 16 and 13 points, respectively. Logan Kennedy led the team with eight rebounds and six assists. In all, eight Flyers scored as they shot 55% from the field and 46.9% from 3-point range.

“They look for each other, and they were smart enough tonight to know who was hot. And that was Rachel and Leia,” Franklin County coach Joey Thacker said. “We do a really good job of being unselfish and finding people when they’ve got their hot hand going.”

As impressive as the offense looked, Franklin County’s defense might have been better. It held Ryle to 18 points in the first half. For the game, Ryle made only 32.8% of its shots. Jaelyn Jones led Ryle with 14 points. Quinn Eubank added 13.

“Our zone’s gotten a lot better with our length,” Thacker explained (three major contributors are 6-feet or taller). “And we can guard by committee, and that helps. … We found out early on, because we played a pretty tough schedule in December, that if we didn’t guard and just tried to outscore people we’d get beat.”

Thacker praised the leadership of his two seniors, Shropshire and Alex Newton. There have been times in her career when Shropshire has been called “to the carpet on some stuff,” Thacker noted, but she’s responded well.

“She had to get more versatile and she had to get tougher and still has to get tougher, but she does a really good job of cutting without the ball now,” Thacker said. “She can go inside and post you up and she does a good job of finding where to get open behind the arc.”

The defending 11th Region champions, Frederick Douglass (18-8), and a host of others will have some say on whether Franklin County will return to the Girls’ Sweet 16. The Broncos rank No. 12 in the Cantrall Ratings and have impressive wins recently over No. 11 Bethlehem and No. 18 Notre Dame. But Douglass also lost 58-50 to Ryle on Jan. 31. The Flyers have not faced Douglass in any of the Broncos’ seven seasons of existence.

Thacker recorded the 500th win of his career on Feb. 2 against Frankfort. Most of those victories came with a Flyers program he has led to six state tournaments and back-to-back state championship games in 2016 and 2017. His career record of 504-222 over 23 seasons unofficially ranks 18th all-time in Kentucky high school girls basketball history. Assistant coach Lee Meadows helped make sure to mark the occasion because his head coach says he just focuses on the next win, not the ones before.

But Thacker appreciated the turnout that evening of many of his former players and their families.

“We’ve just put ourselves in position over the years because we’ve just had great families. And you can coach when it’s that way,” Thacker said. “This is a very unique situation that somebody’s going to step into in a couple of years because everybody here gets it. And that’s an anomaly in 2024.”