By RICHIE HALL
To many student-athletes and colleagues over the past 39 years, he’s been known as “Doc.”
Last month, Jeff Franciosi got a new title: Hall of Famer.
Franciosi, a longtime athletic trainer and teacher in Hamilton County, was inducted into the Indiana Athletic Trainers Association Hall of Fame on June 22 at Franciscan Sports Medicine and Forte Orthopedics in Indianapolis.
“I’m very humbled, but very excited to promote our profession,” said Franciosi.
Franciosi has been the athletic trainer at Guerin Catholic for four years, and had previously been the trainer at Hamilton Southeastern and Fishers for 10 years. He started his athletic training career at Noblesville High School, where he spent 24 years. Franciosi has also been a teacher at Noblesville for nearly four decades – he will be entering his 39th year teaching at NHS this fall.
Franciosi has been an athletic trainer for a long time, which is unusual for the business, since he said trainers are always “the first to arrive at the school and the last to leave at the end of the game.” So why has he stayed so long?
“It’s a passion just to being on the sidelines,” said Franciosi. He also said there’s a “sense of accomplishment when you can get an ACL kid or a kid that’s been hurt for a while, and you can get them back on the field and they excel. You’re a part of their success by being the athletic trainer.”
Franciosi also loves his teaching position. He came to Noblesville right out of graduate school from Indiana State – his first job out of college in 1985 after getting his Masters in Athletic Training. He got his undergraduate degrees at St. Joseph’s College in 1984, in physical education and health.
Having been around so long, Franciosi has seen quite a few changes. The obvious one is how technology has evolved over the years, and how it has helped get student-athletes back on the field quicker.
As for the classroom, Franciosi said that teaching has become more hands-on over the years. A good example would be his sports medicine class.
“We’ll do a project out of clay, and build a knee, and the kids watch an ACL surgery,” said Franciosi. “And then they get to work in groups to do an ACL surgery on a clay knee that they made. So that’s really fun.
“I talk about kids having what I call ‘Oh!’ moments. They’re like ‘Oh, I get it!” And once they get it, that makes me feel good as a teacher. That’s huge when they do that.”
Franciosi noted that the education part of sports training has increased over the years. He spent four years at St. Joseph’s College before going to grad school, then took his certification test.
“Now they’re making kids go four years plus two,” said Franciosi. “You do undergrad, like in exercise science, and then you take an athletic training program that’s going to take you another two years. So the balance, we hope, is that with more education we get more athletic trainers, but also we want to raise the pay scale for them salary-wise, because it’s a hard job. But hopefully it’s a good-paying job, too.”
Franciosi pointed out that athletic trainers “wear tons of hats with this job.” It’s not enough to just know about training, there are other topics to be addressed with student-athletes as well.
“We’ll give advice on nutrition, we’ll do hydration and prevention of heat illness,” said Franciosi. “So, a lot of the stuff we do is preventative, so with nutrition advice, you got to be able to tell the kids what not to take and what to take, and energy drinks and protein shakes and things like that. And so we have to be very astute at that. And then obviously first aid, immediate care, concussion knowledge we need to have, and heat illness knowledge we need to have.”
The work of athletic trainers got more notice on Jan. 2 of this year, when Buffalo Bills player Damar Hamlin suffered cardiac arrest during a Monday Night Football game. Team trainers and paramedics were able to restore his heartbeat while Hamlin was on the field; he would go on to recover and plans to return to the NFL.
“We just don’t tape ankles,” said Franciosi. “There’s so much more emergency medical things we need to recognize like a spleen injury, or an acute appendicitis, or how long to hold out a concussion kid. And I feel we’re pretty good at that. That’s huge.”
Franciosi works with Abbie Rumer at Guerin Catholic; she has been with the Golden Eagles’ staff for five years. Rumer calls Franciosi’s induction into the IATA Hall of Fame “overdue.”
Franciosi and his fellow Guerin Catholic trainer Abbie Rumer show off the regional trophy that the Golden Eagles boys basketball team won early this season. (Photo provided)
“He should have had this a long time ago, because he’s one of the best athletic trainers I’ve ever had the pleasure of working with,” said Rumer. She called Franciosi “the perfect representation” and the “definition of an athletic trainer.”
“He’s very entertaining,” said Rumer. “He keeps me on my toes. He is so knowledgeable and he has a lot of wisdom when it comes to athletic training with what works and what doesn’t, because he’s been around for so long. He’s very reliable.”
Franciosi is known for having a upbeat, friendly personality. But Rumer noted that he can also be serious when he needs to be.
“He’s so bubbly and fun, but he knows that if he has to switch, he can jump into the professional, serious athletic trainer mode, and I think that’s very important, because he knows how to comfort the kids,” said Rumer.
Franciosi has nice things to say about Rumer as well.
“She’s young and very, very good at her job,” said Franciosi. “She’s awesome. She’s a hard worker. We’re the old versus the young, the old school versus the young up-and-coming athletic trainer, and she does an awesome job.”
Franciosi (right) and Rumer attend to Guerin Catholic football player Will
Fremion during a game. (Photo provided)
Rumer said that Franciosi is stuck with her until he retires. But that won’t happen anytime soon.
“I am going to keep going because I still love it,” said Franciosi. “I like walking in the classroom every day and I love being on the sidelines Friday night. I still get that adrenaline rush and it’s still fun to watch football and basketball, and most any sport I like. My wife always says, ‘Even if we didn’t have a game, you’d go to the sidelines and you’d watch anyway,’ and I said ‘She’s probably right.’
“And I appreciate my family so much, my wife understanding the time commitment. She’s been awesome. She’s a personal trainer and owns her own business. A fitness business. It’s called Franciosi Fitness. Makes it simple.”
Franciosi is the third Hamilton County trainer to be inducted into the IATA Hall of Fame. He joins Linda “Dee” Mahoney from Westfield (2018) and Jan Clifton-Gaw from Hamilton Heights (2020).