Managers Inspire Villanova Teams, and Also a Film

By Greg Bishop | NYTimes.com | March 8, 2011

VILLANOVA, Pa. — The chant started in the student section and spread through the Pavilion before Villanova hosted Pittsburgh in basketball here last month. An ESPNfeature had played on the video boards, and as the building shook with a singsong “Nick and Frank-ie!” Wildcats Coach Jay Wright wiped away tears.

Nick is Nick Gaynor, 19, a freshman manager for Villanova’s women’s team. Frankie is Frank Kineavy, 20, a sophomore manager for Wright, the men’s coach.

Both perform those jobs in wheelchairs, because both have cerebral palsy, which did not stop either from making the dean’s list last semester, or becoming the subjects of a student-produced documentary, or attaining local celebrity status.

Nick’s father is Michael Gaynor, director of university admissions. Three summers ago, he met a family in his office lobby, and told a boy in a wheelchair about his own sons,twins, also in wheelchairs. By conversation’s end, he realized the boy’s parents had also married in the summer of 1986, at the same hotel as his wedding, one month apart. When he told his wife, she produced a newspaper article she had saved, and lo and behold, it was about the boy he met.

The boy’s name was Frank Kineavy.

“I don’t believe any of this was by accident,” Michael Gaynor said. “We’re supposed to be here. All of us.”

Kineavy grew up in Sea Girt, N.J. He cannot walk, write or speak. He communicates with a computer system built into his wheelchair, its keyboard filled with words, letters and numbers, which he taps, mostly with the thumb on his right hand. He is Villanova basketball’s resident comedian.

The basketball team at his high school, for which he also served as a manager, traveled each summer to Wright’s camp, and the two developed a relationship. Wright said half of New Jersey recommended Kineavy, including the football coach Charlie Weis, a Kineavy family friend.