OKEMOS - "I wanna get points, I wanna score for my team, and I wanna win," Okemos Track & Field junior captain Sophia Franklin said.

As a junior, Franklin is not only already a captain of the Okemos Track & Field team, but an athlete who the whole team looks up to.

"She puts forth everything she's got everyday you know, she's one of the last people to leave," senior teammate Nolan Stanko said.

Because of the hard work she puts in day in and day out, Franklin finished first at regionals in the 100-meter and 300-meter hurdles and placed second in pole vault.

"There was a lot of screaming (when she won)," Lori Franklin, her mother, said. "You know, I was sitting in the stands and when she won the 100 hurdles and PRed. That was a huge deal, because you know as any person in any type of carrier you get stuck, you plato at a certain thing, and that really broke. She wanted to get under 15 seconds in the hundred hurdles and she got 14.7, I believe. I was just ecstatic for her."

On the day of regionals, everything came together for Sophia, Lori said.

"She tries really hard and you can tell she wants to get better and she wants to improve herself and she brings her teammates with her," Stanko said.

What most people don't know is that Sophia was sick the week of the regional meet.

"She was seeded second in the 100 hurdles and second in the 300 hurdles so we knew she had a chance," Harrod said. "She missed school on Monday and was pretty sick on Tuesday and Wednesday during practice, and just outperformed our expectations on those days," Okemos Track & Field head coach Brian Harrod said.

Being the captain, Franklin is responsible for scheduling and carrying practices, workouts, exercises and more.

"It's made a huge difference. She presents as a really quiet person, but it's really helped her develop here skills talking to people. She's had to lead practices and plan for the team, which has been really good for her, good experience for her," Lori said. "She's really come out of herself. Instead of being more in the shadows, she's learned to take the lead and step out and showing what she can do and helping other people too. She loves being the captain, loves helping everybody on the team."

Sophomore teammate Sage Vanalstine said Franklin, also a hurdler, said having Sophia on her team has taken her to a better level.

"She's just someone to look up to. I always try to compete with her at practice even though I'm not gonna beat her. But I try to compete with her and she pushes me," Vanalstine said.

In the midst of planning for others, Sophia still made time to improve her own athletic abilities.

"She was born with a lot of natural ability, but she works really really hard," Lori Franklin, her mother, said.

Sophia was a dancer before she ever stepped foot on a track, but a middle school coach's request that she try track got her into the sport.

"What she looked at hurdling the very first (time) was leaping over the hurdles like she would in dance and she loved it, she got hooked on it, wanted to do that all the time," Lori said.

Sophia not only looked like a dancer while jumping over hurdles, but she thought like one too.

"In seventh grade I was just thinking I had to leap over these barriers and get to the finish line and be okay, not fall or anything, so I though in ballet you do like a leap, and you leap across the floor and I was like I can do that, that'll work fine," Sophia said. "So I started leaping and I was leaping and running, leaping and running. Obviously that's not what you're supposed to do, but it was working at the time."

As time passed, Sophia could not do both dance and track & field, so she decided to stick with the latter and do her best to be good at what she was doing.

"She decided at first she wanted to be really good at hurdles, so she spent all year round working with different teams, coaches, to try to get better," Lori said. "And once she felt like she was getting really good at that she was given the opportunity to try pole vault and she took to that right away, and as a sophomore, at the end of her sophomore year she said I wanna try to get better at pole vault, so she put in time all far round to get better at pole vault and it's really paid off this year."

Her journey from hurdler to pole vault wasn't one Sophia expected for herself, it took a lot of people to tell her to try it.

"In middle school, the high schoolers come and practice drills with you, and I was a hurdler, I told myself I was strictly a hurdler. I was like, 'I'm not going to dabble in pole vault, that's not my thing,'" Sophia said. "They were like 'you should try it' and I was like 'no, I'm going to stick to hurdles.'"

It was only in high school that her coach convinced her.

"When I got to high school, the track coach said 'I really want you to try pole vault,' and I was like 'okay, fine I'll try it, whatever,' and I really liked it the first day. I thought this was so cool, you get to take a stick and this is sweet, so I kept doing it. After a while I realized that after a period of time you can get better. I was progressing at a rate that I was like, 'I like this.' So I watched this girl, she was seeded first in the state. I saw her vault for the first time and I was like 'I wanna be like that, I wanna be that good."

Lori, her teammates and coach credit Sophia's ability of goal-setting for her success.

"She's just an outstanding kid. She kinda understand what she needs to do at meets, and she goes out and gets it done," Harrod said.

Sophia listens intently to critiques during practices and takes those into account every time she sets up to pole vault or for a hurdle race.

Not only that, but she thinks about every step she has to take to conquer a goal.

"She's all along been good at goal setting, then planning backwards from  the goal saying what do I need to do to get there, so she's got a really good foundation for how to reach her goals," Lori said.

Sophia found the motivation through watching the athletes that were better than her.

"Watching people around me, I was practicing with people that were so good that I was like I wanna be like them and I wanna get better and I wanna be the best," Sophia said. "Like even if I didn't wanna run I was running, even if I didn't do the workout I was still doing the workout. I was there everyday."

Harrod said Sophia gets better from watching others, but also herself, and nitpicking what needs to change.

"She's a YouTube junkie," Harrod said. "She watches a lot of videos of pole vault, hurldes, she watches herself. Self-analysis has really helped her."

Sophia has competed at several regional- and state-level meets, but according to Lori, the most challenging was the National Indoor Track Meet in New York.

"She was so thrilled that she qualified for that. That was a different stage, a national stage for her to be on, it was very scary, very nerve wracking. She competed but she didn't do as well as she wanted, and she was devastated by not doing as well as she wanted," Lori said. "I said this is a good experience for you, this is a stepping stone, you know this will make it easier next time around, you know all these things that parents say, that coaches say. And she was at first not really buying into that but after a couple week she was like you know what? It really made a difference. Now going into meets she's much more relaxed, much more calm, not as nervous, because she already went to the big stage and knows what it's like so she's much more calm."

Because of this experience, Sophia has been able to see that improvement does not come without setbacks.

"I think she realizes it's all two steps forward, one step back, one step forward, one step back. So she's learned that and she's really good at persevering through that, when she has a step back she knows get up and do it again, go to practice and start all over and head forward," Lori said.

Going into the MHSAA state finals for track & field on Saturday, June 4, Sophia was able to feel confident in her skills.

She placed second in pole vault, fourth in the 100-meter hurdles and fifth in the 300-meter hurdles.

"She still has a long way to go, but I know that she'll get there because she's willing to put as much time and as much effort to get there," Lori said.

She is two events and respectively one and two spots away of placing top-three in all of her events at states by the time she graduates high school.

"I hope that she wins states, I think she can do it for sure," Vanalstine said.