Francis’ Tom Passinault, Northville’s Bill Flohr, Remus Chippewa Hills’ Ben Wright and Vicksburg’s Brian Deal.Shortly after, Fournier learned he would be part of the fourth class inducted into Franklin’s Athletics Hall of Fame during halftime of the varsity football team’s Sept. 18 game against rival Livonia Stevenson, joining four athletes, two administrators, former Hometown Life sports editor Brad Emons and the 1990 softball team (more on that squad in a minute).“It definitely wasn’t expected, and it was never really a goal once we got started with this,” Fournier said before a 5-1 win over White Lake Lakeland on April 17. “We just wanted to find a way to make the program the best that we can and give as many kids the opportunity to play and move on to the next level.

We just wanted to build this into a better all-around program.”Fournier has certainly done that since moving to Livonia with his family in 1988.He attended Emerson Middle School, where he has taught for the past two decades, before moving on to Franklin, where he starred on the baseball team before graduating in 1993. While he was never an all-state caliber recruit, he was good enough to walk on at Wayne State, where he played from 1994 to 1997 before graduating in 1998. While never pitching a single game for the Patriots, he became a reliable arm for the Warriors for four seasons.After one year of student teaching, he earned a job with Livonia Public Schools as an elementary teacher but joined some of his college buddies at West Bloomfield coaching baseball, basketball and football.

Eventually, those drives from south Livonia to the far reaches of the Oakland Activities Association, like Clarkston, Lake Orion and Oxford, during rush hour became too much and he joined Franklin’s baseball coaching staff.“It was so hard to get all the way to Oxford from where I was teaching in Livonia,” Fournier said. “Sometimes I wouldn’t get there until just before the first pitch or the end of the first inning.”Travel wasn’t an issue when he became an assistant under then-varsity coach Paul Newitt, who is now the Patriots’ softball coach. After one season with the varsity, Fournier was looking forward to a second, but JV coach David Susalla tragically died in a car accident a few months before the 2003 season.Newitt asked Fournier to step in for Susalla, a position Fournier held for four years before being promoted to head coach after the 2006 season.“Dave and I were really close,” Fournier said.

“His passing has never been lost on me. If Dave were still around, I might still be Dave’s assistant or the JV coach here right now.”More: With Newitt back, Livonia Franklin softball is already 10-0Susalla’s death meant so much that when the JV played its first game without him, Fournier stayed in the dugout and left the third-base coach’s box empty in his honor.Ever since, Fournier has valued his opportunity to lead the Patriots. Losing Susalla shaped Fournier’s approach to coaching the team and building the program, especially because of how loved Susalla was in the Franklin community.“That first full year was dedicated to him, and I’ve never lost sight of that,” Fournier said.

“We lost a good one there, not only as a coach but just as a person and a teacher. For him to pass, and for me to carry some of that with me, I’ve always had that in the back of my mind of how Dave would have handled things had he been in my position today.”And how Fournier has handled things is by making the most of what he has.In his second season as Franklin’s varsity coach, the Patriots won a district championship, snapping an over-20-year drought in the playoffs. They’ve since won three additional district titles over the past 18 years.

As of this writing, Fournier has 363 career wins and expects to eclipse the 400 milestone sometime in the next season or two.Which is saying something because Franklin doesn’t necessarily have future MLB prospects coming through its doors like it once did 40-50 years ago. Fournier has found his niche taking multi-sport athletes and turning them into All-Kensington Lake Activities Association stars — and sometimes even all-state college players.“We have blue-collar, hard-nosed work ethic kinds of kids,” Fournier said. “We don’t get a lot of 8s, 9s and 10s who wa