It’s Wednesday at the Franklin family condo somewhere in Colorado. It also happens to be Addison’s — the younger of the two Franklin daughters — 12th birthday.
During a normal time Addy might be hanging out with friends at home just outside of State College or running around the Lasch Football building trying to find her dad. During normal time things would be like they were just a few weeks ago.
But things have changed, the world slowly grinding to halt as the COVID-19 virus sweeps across the globe and across the nation. So there won’t be any trips outside today. There won’t be any fancy party as friends come and go. Addy is like everyone else, and also different than most everyone else.
Why? Addy has sickle cell anemia, a genetic disorder that causes red blood cells to break down and become misshapen. In turn she is immunocompromised and consequently more susceptible to infectious diseases like the coronavirus. Franklin himself made that fact public in 2014 during a trip to the Penn State Hershey Children’s Hospital.
“Because of my daughter’s illness, we’ve been on lockdown from really the beginning,” Franklin said. “So it’s not something we’ve messed around with at all. We’ve been on total lockdown.”
There is a bright side to all of this. Franklin is, by his own admission, not always around as much as he would like to be. Of course that’s the nature of being a head football coach at a Power Five school. It doesn’t mean Franklin is a bad father, if anything his open door policy for his family and the families of his staff have made the Lasch Building as much a family office as a football office.
There are realities to the world of coaching though, and Franklin is on the road a lot, not always there when his daughters wake up, not always there when they go to sleep.
Now he’s there all the time — a good thing, depending on who you ask.
“I think the first couple days my wife and kids were so happy to see me, and now they’re about ready for me to go back to work,” Franklin said with a laugh. “I would say being around the family is always something that I try to maximize, even when times are crazy. There’s that fine line with me, and I tried to remind my whole staff that this is a blessing in disguise.”
It would be unfair to say Franklin has taken the time off, but there are some comforts to be had when you’re penned up with your family. He and his wife watch the Netflix show ‘Mindhunter’ before bed and are looking forward to the return of ‘Ozark.’ There’s also a little mischief involved too, even if it comes at the expense of others in the same complex of condos.
‘We won’t go in the weight room with other people in there,’ Franklin said. ‘And so I took the 25-pound (dumbbells) and brought them up to our condo because I couldn’t get in there, a guy was dominating the weight room.’
Franklin smiles and pauses.
‘Then he left a nasty note in there. He said, ‘Whoever stole the 25-pound weights, could you bring them back?’ So then I wrote a little note that said, ‘Well, could you stop dominating the weight room for three hours a day?”
At some point things will get back to normal. Nobody really knows when, not even Franklin. When that day comes though maybe Addy can really have a birthday party, and celebrate that 12 is closing in on 13.
