View full sizeThe family of Penn State football coach Bill O'Brien has adapted well to life in State College. From left: Jack, 9, Colleen, and Michael, 7. If you had stopped Colleen O’Brien on the campus of Wake Forest University the day she started law school in 1995 and asked her what she wanted to do with her law degree, she would have told you that she wanted to become a college athletic director.
But that was before she met Bill O’Brien.
Bill was a lowly graduate assistant coach on the Georgia Tech football staff, and Colleen was in town for the weekend when mutual friends introduced them at an Atlanta sports bar hangout of the Yellowjackets coaching staff.
Bill says it was love at first sight. Georgia Tech was fresh off a thrilling overtime win against North Carolina, and the coaches were celebrating the victory at their regular watering hole.
Colleen was there as a guest of Bill’s friend, tight ends coach Doug Marrone. Marrone was dating Colleen’s college roommate, Helen Donnelly.
“My dad and my brother were there, too,” Bill recalls. “They met [Colleen] first. And they were the ones that said, ‘You’d better not screw that up.’ ”
Colleen’s first impression of Bill?
“There were so many football games on that he was really busier watching the games than talking to me,” she says. “But one thing I noticed about him was his sense of humor. He’s very funny, very self-deprecating. Sarcastic. I can be that way, too. So we hit it off.”
Sixteen years later, the young football graduate assistant she met in Atlanta is the head coach at Penn State, and Colleen is the first lady of the Nittany Lions football family, or the head coach's chief of staff, as Bill likes to say.
Colleen still gets to boss around a head football coach, just not in the way she originally intended.
But there are signs of calm in the near future. The project to build an elevator for Jack in the family home is nearing completion, and with spring practice and the coaches caravan in the bag, Bill now only has one last barrage of June camps to get through before he gets to take time off in July.
Until then, he has left household matters in Colleen’s competent hands. Bill likes to joke with reporters that the only thing he helped to unpack was his clothes.
“He’s not kidding,” Colleen says. Then she grins and gestures at the bare walls. “But what he doesn’t know is that once all this construction is done, that’s when the pictures are all going up, and that’s what he’s going to be here for.”