How James Franklin Made the Most of Quarantine

Penn State's head coach described the past three months as 'completely the opposite of the way I've worked for 25 years.' His family would agree.

Penn State coach James Franklin spent more than a month sequestered with his family at their home near State College. Like so many other families, Franklin’s relied on grocery deliveries, wiped everything before using and adhered to strict virus-protection protocols. He tucked his daughters into bed almost every night.

At the same time, Franklin ran a football program, managed a roster of players with disparate access to training and maintained a vigorous recruiting schedule. That's how Franklin spent his time in quarantine: by applying a personal test to the challenge he asks his team to accept daily.

"These are things that we’ve been preaching to our players and our staff forever,” Franklin said in a recent interview. “But now we’re forced to do it on a level like we’ve never seen before.”

Entering his seventh season as Penn State’s head coach, Franklin has hinged his career on organization and structure. His foundation is a coaching manual, compiled over 25 years beginning with his days at small Pennsylvania colleges Kutztown and East Stroudsburg (his alma mater).

The COVID-19 pandemic contributed a new chapter, which included how to give recruits virtual tours of the weight room and how to measure player improvement without practices.

But since March, Franklin also has met a more important challenge: adjusting his work schedule to address family safety. His youngest daughter Addison, who turned 12 in March, has Sickle cell disease, which prompted the Franklins to restrict their potential exposure to the novel coronavirus.

From sequestering at a condominium in Colorado to staying put at home upon returning to Pennsylvania, the family kept a measured distance from other people. Which meant much more time with each other.

As Penn State prepares to resume team activities on campus, Franklin is learning how to blend his worlds again. But how will that work? Will his family still visit for lunch? Will his two daughters be permitted to attend practice? Will Franklin allow himself to drop into other team meetings on a whim?

In a recent interview, Franklin discussed how all this might look and what he gained from working at home. Penn State players can begin returning June 8 and start voluntary workouts, following testing and quarantine, June 15.

Franklin said that his team won’t be returning to business as usual.

“There’s been a bunch of work that’s been put in from football, there’s been a bunch of work that’s been put from the athletic administration, then there’s been a bunch of work put in by the university, and it has to go in that order all the way up to the governor of the state,” Franklin said. “And then everything has to align from that point moving forward. It’s not going to be like this thing ends and we’re all going to jump right back on the horse. It’s going to be a process.”

Maintaining distance

Franklin and his family were in Colorado when Penn State closed its campus in March. They remained through the initial quarantine period as a precautionary measure to protect their daughters, Shola and Addison.

Because those with Sickle cell disease, like Addison, have weakened immune systems, they can get sick more easily. Franklin and his wife Fumi made that the guardrail of their sheltering process, extending it to their own personal exercise regimen.

In Colorado, the Franklins occasionally used their condominium development’s exercise room when it was empty. One day, another guest lingered in the facility. So, Franklin brought a pair of 25-pound weights back to his place.

Someone left a note asking whoever “stole” the weights to return them, which prompted Franklin to leave a response. “Could you stop dominating the weight room for three hours a day?” it said.

“Because of my daughter’s illness, we’ve been on lockdown from the beginning,” Franklin said in late March. “It’s not something we’ve messed around with at all. We’ve been on total lockdown.”

Penn State coach James Franklin with daughters Shola (left) and Addison / USA Today Sports

Even upon returning to State College, the family did not venture from home. Spring recruiting is one of Franklin’s busiest times of the year in terms of travel. Instead, the coach has spent every recruiting moment in his home office.

“My wife says I’m a lot better at it than she anticipated,” Franklin said.

In the past, Franklin normally left for work before his daughters were awake. Occasionally, he was able to put them to bed at night. Vacation was the time dedicated to phone-down attention to the family. Everyone understood.

Lately, though, Franklin has been home all day, so the time was blended. That required an adjustment as well.

“I get great time with my wife and daughters. That’s been phenomenal,” Franklin said. “… The challenge is when I’m home like this, it’s usually vacation, so they’re used to having me for eight hours a day. But I have this little office and I’m sitting in this office for nine hours doing Zoom calls, and that’s a little bit strange because it creates pressure on me.

“They don’t understand: ‘Well how come you’re home, let’s hang out?’ And there’s still work that has to be done, so there’s a little bit of a strange balance there.”

During his Penn State career, Franklin has spoken often about the “coach guilt” with which he lives, particularly during the season’s busiest stretches. The family compensates with almost-daily visits for lunch and to spend time with the players.

Franklin’s daughters hang around practice, deliver pep talks in the training room and consider players to be an extended part of their family. That will change in the interim, as Penn State implements its protocols for returning, which will limit outside contact.

Plenty else has changed as well, notably in how Franklin and his staff coach football. Yet, that has allowed Franklin to reinforce one of his favorite phrases: “Get comfortable being uncomfortable.” His players have heard it frequently since March.

“Obviously, this is unplanned adversity,” tight end Pat Freiermuth said. “But I think [Franklin] is smiling somewhere, kind of being like, ‘I’m interested to see how my team is going to handle this.’”

Thriving during crisis

Penn State closed its main campus March 13 during spring break, five days before the football team was scheduled to begin drills. Players were scattered, some without books and study materials, and none was about to practice.

Instead, the team met weekly, coaches met three times a week, position coaches held their own video calls and parents were invited to a weekly call with the head coach. At the same time, offensive coordinator Kirk Ciarrocca installed his offense remotely, while new assistants John Scott Jr. (defensive line), Taylor Stubblefield (receivers) and Phil Trautwein (offensive line) administered quizzes in their virtual rooms.

It was hectic, but Franklin sought to make the disruption an asset. 

During a team meeting early in the shutdown, Franklin showed his players a quote from former Intel president and CEO Andrew Grove: "Bad companies are destroyed by crises. Good companies survive them. Great companies are improved by them."

“Obviously, we want to be in that [third] category,” he said.

For Franklin, the embrace of video meetings (with staff, players, recruits and parents) has opened avenues that he admitted should have been pursued sooner. He wants Penn State to extend the video sessions into road-recruiting schedules and vacations when both resume. Don’t expect to get any beach time this summer when the team returns, Franklin said.

“I think Coach has always been a guy to push the envelope to get better,” running backs coach Ja’Juan Seider said. “… The thing I love about Coach is, everybody has a voice. Everybody has a slot where you can say what you want to say. I respect the hell out of coach for that.”

Franklin said that this spring forced him inside, into his home office, onto a computer for most of the day, “and that’s completely opposite of the way I’ve worked for 25 years.” He expects to emerge more productive.

“It’s like I tell the players all the time: If you want to grow, sometimes you have to force yourself into some uncomfortable situations to do that,” Franklin said. “And this right here, you had no choice. It forced you to grow.”