This year’s edition of “People Who Make a Difference” shows that having a disability does not make someone disabled.
Emily Frederick, Tom Kleban, and Michelle McManus might not do things in the same way as others, but that does not lessen their desire to do good work in the community.
Their disabilities do not hold them back. Rather, they are encouraged to pass along to others that nothing should be taken for granted, and physical limitations are an obstacle only as much as the mind allows them to be.
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At age 18, Emily Frederick has already worked to help broaden access to athletics for students with disabilities around the country, and she also has shown that ability athletes compete just as hard as their able-bodied peers. She is now continuing those efforts as a freshman at Penn State.
Too humble to speak about her achievements, Frederick, who has dwarfism, has summed them up in her college admissions essay:
“Little did I know that just a few years ago that a steel, six pound, and just a tad bit dirty shot put would be my best friend, would be the implement that lead to a national-championship medal being placed around my neck and a shot at making the Olympic team. I am a dwarf. I am a national champion. I am unique. I will succeed. While things may be improbable, they are certainly not impossible. And I have the medal to prove it.”
The last half of 2016 has been a whirlwind for Frederick, a member of Penn State’s ability athletics program. Originally from Gadsden, Alabama, she moved to University Park and received a call during the first week of classes that she had been selected to compete for the US team at the Paralympic Games in Rio.
Frederick did not initially qualify for the games in shot put, but made the national team after the Russian delegation was banned from the Paralympics.
“The call came on Wednesday, and I had to leave on Sunday … it was crazy,” she says. “I had to drop everything. But competing against people like me in an environment like that made it all worth it.”
She finished ninth in the shot put, a sport she has been competing in for only three years. She now has her sights set on the World ParaAthletics Championships in London next summer and the next Paralympic Games in Tokyo in 2020.
She says she chose Penn State because of its ability athletics program. She grew up playing soccer, basketball, and volleyball. Her mother, Marcia Farabee, was a track coach at her high school, and Frederick became interested in track after a fortuitous misunderstanding.
She had intended to visit the LakeShore Foundation in Alabama to obtain pedal extenders that would allow her to drive. However, she ended up at the foundation’s sports training facility, and the rest is history.
“I joined their sports club and went to my first Paralympics during my sophomore year,” she says. “My mom was an assistant track coach, and I had grown up going to meets. The shot put seemed like a natural fit.”
Emily Frederick
Standing at 4-feet tall, Frederick says there’s not much difference between how she throws and how another athlete would throw. She trains with fellow ability athletes Max Rohn and Brett Gravatt in the Multi-Sport Facility on campus.
Teri Jordan, Penn State’s ability athletics coordinator, has traveled to Paralympic Games and other events around the world with her team and is constantly working to introduce the program and its athletes to the community.
Since returning from Rio in late September, Frederick and her teammates have participated in workshops and other outreach events designed to shed light on the world of ability athletics. It is a continuation of the work she did as a high school student in Alabama, where her efforts helped start a Paralympics program for high school students at the state level.
Now that the excitement of Rio and the weeks that followed are over, she says she hopes to begin life as a normal college student, joining clubs and focusing on her kinesiology. She plans to stay at Penn State for her master’s degree in sports psychology and focus her career on working with ability athletes.
Farabee says she is amazed at how her daughter has been welcomed by the Penn State community, even though she has been on campus for only a few months. Frederick was recognized on the field at a football game this season and mingled with alumni during homecoming weekend.
“To be embraced like that so quickly is very comforting for this mother,” Farabee says. “I can be 15 hours away and know that there are people who care about her.”
Any doubts Frederick had about her performance at the Paralympics quickly went away once she came back to campus.
“She didn’t come back from Rio with a medal; she finished in ninth place and was extremely disappointed,” Farabee says. “To be welcomed into this community, not because she’s on top of the world … I know that the future for her at Penn State has so much potential.”
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Michelle McManus grew up in Memphis, Tennessee, during a time when support groups for people disabilities were scarce. She went to a small college, and, upon moving to Happy Valley, still wasn’t sure about getting involved with an advocacy organization.
“I went to sight-loss support group on and off and attended some of the audio description events on campus,” she says. “Being in a group for blind people wasn’t really a thing until I came up here.”
She attended her first meeting of the Happy Valley chapter of the National Federation of the Blind in 2010 and has been involved ever since. She now serves as the organization’s president.
The group’s mission is to spread awareness about blind people in the community and help sighted people feel more comfortable interacting with blind people.
McManus’s fiancé, Brent Carper, faced some of those challenges when the two began dating after meeting online.
“At first, I was dumbfounded. I’d never really been around anyone who was blind before, and I thought I needed to treat her with kid gloves,” he says. “It took me about a week to realize she was just as self-sufficient as you or I.”
Carper is now involved in the NFB, as well, and the two have been fostering a love of traveling with a cruise to the Caribbean earlier in the fall and another already planned for next year.
McManus’s personal involvement in the NFB paved the way for a career at Penn State. The NFB sued Penn State in 2011 over Web sites that it claimed were inaccessible to blind users who used screen readers and other assistive technologies to view them. That suit lead to the development of a Web accessibility office, where McManus now works.
The team meets with units throughout campus to make sure Web sites are accessible. McManus says people are often surprised how little effort is needed to make a Web site accessible.
“It’s about getting people to understand what is needed by the users,” she says. “They don’t realize how easily things can be made accessible by doing things like putting headings in for navigation and linking text properly.”
McManus has lived in State College for more than a decade and has been pleased by some of the improvements that help her in daily life, such as CATA buses that have audio recordings that say which route they are for and street signs that signal which way the “walk” sign is pointing. The NFB has advocated for those enhancements.
Looking forward, McManus says one goal she has for the chapter is reaching out to people with vision impairments who are not currently part of the group. The chapter also is working with researchers at Penn State on Third Eye, a shopping device that uses computer learning to help blind people shop independently.
“At one point, we didn’t even know if we were going to have a chapter, but now we have 23 members who have paid dues,” McManus says. “We are trying to get more of the vision-impaired population around here involved.”
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A lifelong Centre County resident, Tom Kleban was an athlete at Penn State as a decathlete on the track and field team. His career was halted in July 1989 when he was injured in a swimming accident while visiting friends in New Jersey. He was paralyzed from the neck down and remains in a wheelchair today.
Kleban now devotes his time to helping State High’s boys’ and girls’ track teams as an assistant coach. At meets and practices, he’s part motivational speaker, part encyclopedia, and part inspiration to the hurdler teams. He has an infectious smile that lights up his face whenever he talks about the students he works with at State High — especially since the boys’ team won the PIAA title in the spring.
“My purpose is to give a little back something that my previous coaches and other people have allotted me,” he says.
He began as a volunteer coach five years ago and became a member of the paid coaching staff last fall. Steve Shisler, State High’s boys’ head coach, has known Kleban since the 1980s and says the coaching progression was natural as Kleban began to work more closely with the team.
“Tom has an outstanding ability to relate to the high school kids of today,” Shisler says. “He has knowledge of virtually all the different events that track and field offers. While he doesn’t have the ability to demonstrate, he’s able to translate the knowledge that’s in his head from years of competing.”
As unconventional as that approach may seem, it’s working.
“We work with such a fantastic group of kids. They are all so dedicated, and they’re like sponges for absorbing this information,” Kleban says. “Whatever tasks you give them, they exceed whatever expectation you have for them. They are the best group in the world.”
Kleban’s day job is as a senior research analyst for Vantage Investment Advisors in State College. He earned a bachelor’s degree and an MBA from Penn State — the majority of those degrees were completed after the accident. He’s also worked as a volunteer coach for the Penn State track and field team.
When he is not working or coaching, he loves following Penn State and State High athletics. Many of the students on the track teams run cross country in the fall, and he supports them at home meets.
“Once you start with these kids, it’s amazing to see them grow,” he says. “It’s a tight-knit group, and I am always sad to see them go when they graduate.”
