Outgoing Franklin baseball coach Ryan Feyerabend, left, chats with outfielder Max Clark before a game at Victory Field in May.
Daily Journal file photo
When your work-life balance gets out of whack, sometimes you need to take something off of the scale to make it work.
For Ryan Feyerabend, that meant less time in the dugout.
After 13 years on the Franklin coaching staff, including the last 10 as head coach, Feyerabend is resigning to spend more time with his family.
Feyerabend, who exits with a 119-100-1 record across nine seasons (no games were played in 2020), says that balancing his coaching duties with not only his family but his job — he’s worked at Jackson Systems in Indianapolis for 16 years — has gotten more and more difficult with each passing season.
“I’m not a teacher, so it makes it pretty difficult,” Feyerabend said. “We really have to flex our schedules in the spring to make all this happen. We’ve been able to manage that … knowing that at some point it was going to have to come to an end.”
With his sons (ages 7 and 5) getting more active themselves, Feyerabend also felt the time had come where he needs to be more involved in their activities.
“My kids are getting older and playing their sports,” he said, “and I know my wife could use a little more help in the spring.”
For the past three seasons, Feyerabend has coached the state’s top player in Max Clark, who was named Gatorade’s National Player of the Year earlier this month and is expected to be one of the top five players selected in the upcoming Major League Baseball draft.
Feyerabend — who was on the bench with Clark one last time at the North-South All-Star games this past weekend in Lafayette — says that the timing of his departure is coincidental, and that he believes Franklin baseball will still be in a good place going forward despite the graduation of a talented senior class.
“I think we’ve stabilized the program and definitely moved it in the right direction,” Feyerabend said, “and I think it’s just time for someone else to take what we’ve built on and continue to build on that.”
A 1996 Franklin graduate, Feyerabend won’t be venturing too far away; he’ll still be helping out with the youth teams in town and elsewhere as needed.
Even though he won’t have as much time to regularly commit to the cause, Feyerabend remains a Grizzly Cub to his core.
“I’m not going anywhere,” he said.
