#OneTribe: Our Staff Stories Part III

Florida State athletics has not been immune to the world-changing COVID-19 pandemic. Over the past few weeks we have been chronicling the stories of our student-athletes in our #OneTribe #OurStory series, and we aren’t finished yet.

While the health and welfare of our student-athletes remains our focus, there are countless untold stories out there about what members of our FSU administration, coaching and support staffs are going through in their lives.

In the spirit of our #OneTribe series, the Florida State sports information staff has provided a forum for those who are working tirelessly behind the scenes to help our student-athletes cope with their new normal, to share their stories. It is our hope that by providing this canvas, Seminoles everywhere can make relatable connections with those they might only know from the athletics arena, if at all.

This is the third installment of #OneTribe: Our Staff Stories:

Jake & Cheryl Pfeil

Executive Associate Director of Sports Medicine/Football Trainer

Coordinator of Athletic Training Services and Operations/Insurance Coordinator

Bike rides around the neighborhood, whiffle ball sessions in the front yard and breakfasts together are some of the simple pleasures that Jake and Cheryl Pfeil are enjoying now with their sons Cole and Cade, which simply weren’t possible prior to the COVID-19 pandemic.

For nearly 16 years of marriage, the Pfeils have worked across the Don Fauls Athletic Training Room Facility from each other, tending to the needs of Florida State student-athletes. Like most professional couples, raising a family requires a great deal of planning and execution. That’s still the case entering week seven of the shutdown of America as it once was.

Yet instead of tending to more than 100 football players into the early evening – a routine for roughly seven months out of the year – Jake has the time to fix breakfast, provide coaching tips in the front yard and generally spend more time with his wife and boys.

“Normally I’m long gone before anybody gets up,” said Jake, who is entering his 10th season as the head football trainer. “Cheryl’s always been tasked with handling all of that; get ‘em up, get ‘em ready and get ‘em to school. Luckily school is right next door, so she can get them there and comes in.

“I’ve never really had that opportunity to interact in the morning. When I’m kissing them goodnight I tell them, ‘See you tomorrow afternoon.’ I’ll never see them in the morning. For me, that’s been nice, to have mornings to get up, come downstairs and make breakfast for them and eat breakfast in the kitchen. That’s something I never get to do that I’ve really enjoyed with this.”

“It’s been really nice to have the help,” said Cheryl, whose schedule is flexible enough that she is able to get the boys off to nearby Hawks Rise Elementary School each morning, pick them up and juggle homework, after-school activities and the like.

“Most of the times they’re really happy when Dad comes home. They’re happy to get a break from me. Now, he walks in the door and it’s, ‘Hey Dad,’ because he’s here all the time. Before it’s like, ‘It’s a party! Dad’s home.’”

To be clear, there are still plenty of challenges, both at work and home.

“I’ve been going in every morning,” Jake said. “We have a football staff meeting via Zoom every Monday morning at 8 and I just do that from the office. We’ve been able to have a few players who are still permitted to come in (to the training room) who are doing rehabs…It was really busy at first, figuring out who could stay, who could not stay and who could come back to the building, because we had a bunch of surgeries. We had a bunch of guys needing physical therapy so we were setting them up…and setting them up with where they were going to be. Once we had them set up, it’s not as bad.”

Still, he’s responsible for monitoring and communicating with those players who are being treated remotely, “making sure it’s going how you hope it goes.”

“It’s certainly not easy and you’re have to trust that things are getting done…When things are normal, we see them every single day,” Jake said. “They’re not doing it every single day when they’re at home. They’re working in a clinic with somebody two or three days a week, tops, and you’re counting on them to get things done on their own. And every guy is different. Parents have been a big help on some of them.”

The bulk of Cheryl’s work is administrative, but no less important, as the insurance coordinator and director of operations for the sports medicine staff. That mail is being delivered only once a week to the Moore Center puts a premium on her organizational skills.

“I can do most of my work from home,” she said. “I go in once a week to kind of scan things in because I have a lot to upload into the bill-pay system…That’s difficult to do because of the volume, but all of the (other) important things I need to do I can do remotely.

“It’s just trying to communicate with our staff about where they’re sending people, and then communicating with the staff at those facilities to get billing information corrected…It’s working weird hours, working around (the kids’) school, but the workload in the same.”

And now, a bit less stressful after teaching her final twice-a-week class of the semester on Thursday.

Still, there’s the matter of home-schooling, which has come with the school closures. Cole, 9, is in third grade, while Cade, who turns 6 in June, is finishing up kindergarten.

“My kids don’t fight about bedtime and they get up about the same time every day,” Cheryl said. “They’re usually up by 7:30 and I don’t have to wake them up…They pretty much handle that for me. I try to have them teeth brushed, dressed and starting school by 9. That’s usually our plan.

“We’ll do an hour or so (or school) and we’ll stop and take a bike ride just to get out of the house and get some fresh air. We’ll usually do that twice a day…We’ll do that, get back to the house, do more school and have lunch and I’ll usually kick them out for an hour to play outside. Usually we’re done with school about 1:30 or 2 o’clock and I can kind of send them off to play so I can do paperwork.”

The boys – all three of them – have become especially fond of Wednesdays, which is the day Cheryl goes into work.

“It’s kind of become our new little routine because our kids have literally gone nowhere since this thing hit, so that’s their Wednesday distraction,” Jake said. “I’ll come in Wednesday and work through noon and she’ll bring them in. They’ll actually get in the car and see something other than our yard…We’ve started calling it ‘Whataburger Wednesday.’ We’ll leave the stadium, stop and grab some Whataburger’s and go back home. It’s their excursion for the week.”

Cheryl has enjoyed watching Cole work independently on his school work, and Cade’s developing imagination with his assignments. Jake has gained a great appreciation of the boys’ developing motor skills over the course of the past year.

“Thinking where we left off last year playing t-ball and baseball; Cade was playing t-ball and now we’re out in the yard and not using a tee,” Jake said. “It’s good to see he can kind of progress on his own and we can get it a little bit better out in the yard.”

“The thing I’m enjoying the most is that we can get outside and walk, ride bikes; just chatting and playing,” Cheryl said. “It’s nice having Jake home, too, where we can do things together as a family and play a board game, walk the dog or just watch a show together, which we’re never really able to do.”

In between, Cheryl has also spent time trying to “right-size” the effects of COVID-19 for their sons to, “try and help them understand that it’s not going to last forever.”

Jake offered a bit of a longer, pragmatic view on how life has changed.

“I think it’s been good that we realize that we all still actually like each other,” he chuckled. “Let’s face it, when it’s normal, I’m gone a lot.” – Bob Thomas

David Johnson

Football Running Backs Coach and Recruiting Coordinator

Florida State running backs coach and recruiting coordinator David Johnson has been directly impacted by the COVID-19 virus. His mother-in-law, Artherene Encalade, is currently on a ventilator in a New Orleans hospital. The 73-year-old mother of Johnson’s wife, Akeia, has been in the hospital for more than a month and was placed on a ventilator 35 days ago. The hospital, with more than 900 COVID-19 patients, is not allowing visitors so Akeia has not been able to travel back to New Orleans and be with her mother during this time. The family does not know exactly where her mother picked up the virus, further underscoring the importance of protecting vulnerable members of our communities. Recently, the wives of Florida State football coaches and staff drove past the Johnson’s house to express their support of Akeia – as told to Derek Satterfield

Cindy Hartmann

Deputy Athletics Director for Administration

Sam Hartmann has everything in place for the 2020-21 school year. The son of Cindy Hartmann, FSU’s Deputy Athletics Director for Administration, will be attending Rollins College in the fall where he will play lacrosse for the NCAA Division II program in Winter Park, Fla.

What he doesn’t have is closure of his senior year at Chiles High. The COVID-19 pandemic brought his breakout final season as the Timberwolves captain to a premature conclusion, scrubbed the senior prom and may well prevent his parents from watching their first-born walk across the stage at the Donald L. Tucker Center and receive his diploma.

“This is a different year,” Cindy said. “Someone reminded me the other day that he was born in October of 2001, right after 911, and the world was a different place then. In some ways this is fitting.

“Obviously there is recognition that there are far bigger problems than sports, but when you hone it down and how it affects your kid and life…this season was his season. He was doing really well. He was captain and things were as you would want your senior year. You want to go out with a bang.”

To be sure, it’s a challenging time to have a high school senior in the house.

“He’s really handled it great,” Cindy said of her son. “I think it affects some of the parents more than it does the students. They think they know what they’re missing, but because they haven’t experienced it they don’t necessarily know what they’re missing. Because parents have gone through it. A lot of the angst that I hear about is because a parent is expressing it to their kids.

“There have been a few moments of sadness, where it’s, ‘Oh, that’s over,’ or, ‘I’m not going to see my friends.’ I can’t believe my kids actually say these words, but, ‘I really miss school.’ I’ve waited 18 years to hear those words.”

A two-sport athlete at Chiles – the 6-foot-6 Hartman played basketball in the winter before taking his sizeable talents to the lacrosse field – he is keeping busy. Between online school, working three days a week at Summerbrooke Golf Club and working out five days a week in the garage gym, there isn’t a lot of idle time.

“Now it’s focus forward,” Cindy said. “‘What do I need to do to get ready?’ Knowing (college lacrosse) is around the corner has really been helpful.”

Having their two children – daughter Olivia, 16, is a sophomore volleyball and basketball player at Chiles – at home has also been therapeutic for Cindy and her husband Troy.

“You go to work and deal with the stress of what this means on a global scale, an economic scale; what this means for our department and our personnel,” she said. “Those are heavy issues. The levity of coming home and just being able to be mom, I feel like I’m able to be all-in more, because we’re not running to a volleyball match or a lacrosse game or an FSU function. When you’re home, you’re really here.”

Family and sports have always been the centerpieces in the Hartmann house. Cindy played four years of basketball at Syracuse before launching her athletic administration career. Troy played basketball at North Dakota State, was also in collegiate athletic administration and is now the vice president of Charlotte, N.C.-based Scholastic Sports Marketing, working remotely from home.

“We’re all athletic in the family and a lot of times we’re just looking for something active to do,” Cindy said. “Either that, or everything becomes a competition. We had a Chore Day and I put full page together with all these chores and you got certain points for the ones you did. They were up and at it right away. You want to win, right? You want to be the best.

“We spend a lot of times outdoors and we’re making the most of it, because you know what, Sam is not going to be here next year. He’s going to be away at school. That’s the blessing in a lot this. We get an enormous amount of time that we otherwise wouldn’t have had and we get to spend it together. You’ve got to find the things that make you happy and give you hope through all this.”

That’s not to say that there isn’t some disappointment with the way things are playing out.

Some of Cindy and Troy’s conversations during the COVID-19 crisis have ranged from discussing what Sam’s freshman bio at Rollins will look like – “It’s not going to have the All-Big Bend accolades and MVP…” – to him not having his yearbook signed by his friends and classmates to look back on in 20 years.

“Graduation is the one that hurts,” she said. “Leon County hasn’t made a decision yet…That one will be very disappointing. You were going to have graduation and these great moments when your kid is walking across the stage. You’ve waited 18 years for that moment, and then you go home and celebrate with family and friends. A car drive-by just isn’t going to cut it…

“That’s the hard part and you can’t really recapture that. That’s the part I struggle with; the lack of closure. You left your season mid-season. You left your last semester…mid-semester. It’s just open-ended and you didn’t finish the book.”

They have chosen not to “wallow” in disappointments.

“There will be opportunities to celebrate when the time comes,” she said.

Until then Hartmann’s are enlisting their willing children to assist with a years-in-the-making To-Do list, embracing family game nights and actually sitting down to dinner together.

“I used to cook on Sundays and have enough leftovers so they could grab-and-go during the week,” Cindy said, noting that she’s now cooking dinner five or six times a week. “All of a sudden I feel like we’ve turned back time a dozen years.”

In time, she said, we will all look back on these days.

“We’re going to be sitting there in September going, ‘Remember when? I really miss…,’” Cindy said. “I’m trying to think of all those things I’m going to say and capture them now.

“Life just gave us a pause button.” – Bob Thomas

Florida State University Athletics

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