Â
  BY Tony Smith
Softball great Mark Sorenson may have blocked Carl Franklin's path to the New Zealand squad as a player but he has enlisted the Canterbury man as assistant-coach of the world champion Black Sox.
"It's a pretty big honour," Franklin said yesterday after Softball New Zealand confirmed his appointment. "When the best player in the world rings and asks you to be his assistant, what do you say?
"I'm pretty excited to be working with Mark. He's got a great knowledge of the game - as a hitter, you just couldn't get him out; he didn't have a weakness. If he's half the coach he was as a player, I think we should be pretty successful.
"When Mark first talked to me about the job, he said he hoped I would bring the fire I played with to the coaching," Franklin quipped.
The 42-year-old is the first Canterbury man to win national championship titles as a player and a coach. He played for Canterbury for nine seasons, including on the 1996-97 championship team that broke a 58-year title drought.
A left-handed top order hitter, he made a couple of national training squads but never got to play for the Black Sox. "I was a catcher and a first baseman but I wasn't going to beat Mark Sorenson into the team was I?"
The Richmond club stalwart proved his credentials as a coach by leading the Canterbury Red Sox to three successful National Fastpitch Championship finals, culminating in their 2011 victory - their first for 14 years.
He said he owed a lot "to the Canterbury management, guys like Jayden Moore and Murray Britt, and the two captains, Gareth Cook and Stephen Ratu. Those guys probably made look a better coach than I was."
Franklin - the first Black Sox assistant-coach from Canterbury since Dale Eagar in the 1990s - said watching the Black Sox win their sixth world championship title in Auckland in March whetted his appetite to coach at international level.
"It made me think I wouldn't mind being a part of that."
Sorenson said he had always admired Franklin's qualities on the diamond. "He was that gritty type of player that never went away. There were other guys in the [Canterbury] side who warranted more attention, but inevitably it was Carl who came out and broke you.
"He's someone who's well respected, especially among the southern softball fraternity, and was under-rated nationally. I think he will add a lot of value. Those values and ethics are things that are really important to me and what I want to bring to this campaign."
Franklin will also hook up with Black Sox manager Grant McCarroll, his "roommate for five years with Canterbury". "It'll be good working with him, but I also felt for [Canterbury Red Sox manager] Jayden Moore, who missed out on the manager's job. Hopefully, there'll still be a role for him with the Black Sox."
The Black Sox management team will meet at the end of the month to plot their campaign. Sorenson said former Black Sox coach Don Tricker had agreed to help with the planning process and the group would also "tapping into the knowledge" of Sorenson's predecessor Eddie Kohlhase, who led the Black Sox to the the 2013 title, and Mike Walsh, who won two world titles in 1984 and 1996.
