Steve Franks: Marist School
Franks was inducted into the Georgia Dugout Club Hall of Fame in 2021.
His time as a high school baseball head coach was short.
However, a closer look at Steve Franks’ coaching resume as the Marist School’s varsity baseball coach and its hard to overlook his achievements -- two state titles (1990, 1993) in a four-year span.
A strong ambassador for amateur sports, Franks was inducted into the Georgia Dugout Club Hall of Fame as part of the Class of 2021.
“I’m humbled by it,” he said. “When Bobby Howard and Hugh Buchanan told me I was going in, I told them there had to be somebody better. I only did it for four years. They told me there was no telling how many kids Jerry (Queen) and I had put into college. I owe a lot of gratitude to Jerry Queen.”
Franks teamed up with Queen, a GDC Hall of Fame member, to help Marist put together one of the state’s most-dominant runs in history from 1980-1993 when the school won six state baseball titles and finished as state runner-up twice. Franks was Queen’s assistant from 1980-89 before he took over the program.
He also coached football from 1980-1994 and served as the school’s athletic director for five years before jumping into the college ranks and becoming an assistant coach/recruiting coordinator at Vanderbilt in January, 1995. He moved into athletic administration as Assistant Athletic Director/Football Operations in December, 1996, then served as Associate Athletic Director of Operations from 2000-04 before returning to Georgia and becoming the Athletic Director of The Lovett School in June of 2004. He retired in 2019.
Franks’ baseball ties helped lure a young assistant coach named Tim Corbin from Clemson to Vanderbilt, who would eventually lead the Commodores to national baseball titles in 2014 and 2019.
“He’s a first-class individual as a coach and as a person,” said former Parkview coach and GDC Hall of Fame member Hugh Buchanan.
“He has worn a lot of hats over the years. I couldn’t be happier for him. He was a very talented baseball coach. He also had a way of dealing with youngsters that was very unique. He helped drive them not just on the field, but also off the field. He helped carry them the right way.”
A native of Russellville, Ala., Franks played on three state championship football teams in high school. He graduated from North Alabama in 1974 with his bachelor’s degree, then received his master’s in Administration/Supervision from West Georgia in 1982.
At Lovett, he oversaw more than $28 million worth of athletic department projects.
He was state Coach of the Year twice and recognized by the Atlanta Braves 400 Club as its High School Coach of the Year in 1993. He was Assistant Football Coach of the Year six times and served as the state coordinator for Team Georgia, which annually competed in the Sunbelt Classic in McAlester, Oklahoma. In 2013, Franks was named Georgia High School Athletic Director of the Year by the Georgia Athletic Directors Association.
But Franks’ biggest impact perhaps came during his time at Marist.
“When Coach Queen and I coached together, we sort of had this good cop, bad cop deal,” Franks said. “I was the good cop, while he was the bad cop. I enjoyed my role, but about a year or two before he retired, we changed roles. He told me he was tired of the bad cop role and wanted to be the good cop. We played Columbus High and they beat us pretty bad. I used to keep this little book where I wrote down the things we needed to work on. After the game, Coach Queen talked to the team about things we needed to do better, and then he asked me if I had anything I wanted to say.
“I told them, ‘Yeah, I do,’ and that it was going to take a while. I ripped into them like there was no tomorrow. I even got onto the guys chasing down the foul balls. After my tirade, coach came up to me and told me he was proud of me and that I had figured out the bad cop thing. Coach Queen was a good man and a consumate coach. There’s no way I would have had the success I had without him.”
Known as a player’s coach, Franks said his greatest honor is the countless emails, texts and phone calls he still receives from former players.
“That is meaningful to me … you can’t put a dollar sign on that,” he said. “A lot of times they call to see how I’m doing or needing advice. I’m just honored to have had a small part and an impact on a kid’s life.”