The main issue I am trying to resolve is that textures are stretching over a sphere a little poorly. I am going to have a plane represent the sphere, turn off the sphere’s render and have the plane follow the sphere around without any collision.
Is there a way to make the plane act as a child and follow the instantiated game object around?
Appreciate the help. 
If you want something like a child, just make it a child. That is set the Transform.parent of the plane to the transform of the sphere. I don’t know how your game is constructed, but in the Start() for the sphere you can do something like:
GameObject go = GameObject.Find("Plane");
go.transform.parent = transform;
You could also do it the other way around. Have the sphere set its transform to a public variable on a script attached to the plane. The plane script might look like:
public Transform toFollow = null;
void Update() {
if (toFollow != null)
transform.position = toFollow.position;
}
The parent/child follows position, rotation, and scale. The second solution only follows the position, though it could be augmented to follow other properties.