Daily Local News (West Chester, PA)
Franklin, PSU trying to stay on track
The last two-plus weeks have been very strange for all of us, including James Franklin.
The Penn State football coach always seems to be in motion, whether it’s coaching, recruiting from town to town or working inside Lasch Building. He can’t sit still.
“I’m a guy that will work and watch film in my office,” Franklin said, “then get up and walk around the office. I’ll sit in the offensive room, the defensive room or with the recruiting staff. I’ll stop down and see the guys in the training room or in the weight room, whatever it may be.”
That’s all changed for Franklin, who’s been mostly confined to a vacation condominium in Colorado with his family since the coronavirus outbreak.
Franklin and his wife, Fumi, have been especially careful and have self-quarantined in order to protect their younger daughter, Addison, who has sickle cell anemia.
“Because of my daughter’s illness, we’ve been on lockdown from really the beginning,” Franklin said. “It’s not something we’ve messed around with at all.”
He’s doing that while also trying to run the Penn State program from behind a computer with the help of Zoom and FaceTime. That means video conferencing every morning with director of athletics Sandy Barbour and then with deputy AD Scott Sidwell, his immediate supervisor; every other day with his coaching staff; at least once a week with the entire team; and, oh, yeah, with Penn State’s recruits in the Class of 2021.
It’s challenging, as he said countless times earlier this week during a video conference with the media.
“I’m not a sit-in-front-of-thecomputer-for-nine-hours-a-day guy,” Franklin said. “but that’s basically what I’ve been doing. That’s how it’s been. It’s forcing people out of their comfort zone. If it’s approached the right way, we can learn from this and we can grow from this.”
Franklin worries about the more than 100 players on the roster. Some are in State College, but most of them are at home, scattered across the country, because Penn State was shut down when the university was on spring break.
Keeping tabs on all of them to make sure they’re completing their online course work and following individualized instructions from the strength and conditioning staff is almost an impossible task. On top of that, some of them left their iPads or laptops on campus. Some don’t have computers or wireless capability in their homes.
“There are a lot of individual situations that are very difficult from a lot of perspectives,” Franklin said, “whether it’s their home situation, whether it’s finances, whether it’s where they’re sleeping or where they’re eating. All those things are pretty much taken care of for them at Penn State.
“Early on, I think there was a lot of concern and a lot of uneasiness. People were unsettled. People were concerned, and I still think that’s there. But we’ve gotten to a point where we’ve been able to bring back some of the structure and some of the interaction, which I think has been helpful.”
Penn State has canceled in-person classes for the rest of the semester and commencement in early May. The football team canceled spring practice and its Pro Day.
Complicating matters for Franklin and his staff is that he’s hired four new assistant coaches since the end of last season who haven’t been able to be on the field with the players at their positions.
He was asked how much time he thinks the Nittany Lions need to be on campus and prepare for the upcoming season. He couldn’t answer. He and his assistant coaches usually vacation with their families in July. He’s told them to be prepared not to do that this year.
For someone like Franklin who thrives on organization and planning, this has been a very different hurdle.
“Not knowing when this is going to end, that’s probably the most challenging thing to me,” he said. “I want to be able to come up with a very specific plan that I can give our players and parents. And I don’t have that answer.”
Franklin doesn’t want pity. He understands the dangers involved with coronavirus. Before he answered the first question, he praised health-care workers and stressed that sports pale in comparison to the battle against coronavirus.
But he has a job to do, and that’s to coach the Penn State football team during these unique and trying times.
“One of the quotes we used in our first team meeting is from (author) Andy Grove,” Franklin said. “The quote says, ‘Bad companies are destroyed by crisis. Good companies survive them. Great companies are improved by them.’ We want to be in that category.
“It’s a fine line. We want to be sensitive to what’s going on in our country, but we also have a responsibility to make sure we’re doing everything we possibly can to make sure our guys are still getting a great education and still taking care of their bodies.”