Led US wheelchair basketball team to gold at Paralympics
A longtime advocate for people with disabilities, Frank T. Burns spent 17 years as a physical education teacher at the Sonia Shankman Orthogenic School in the South Side Woodlawn neighborhood and coached successful U.S. men’s wheelchair basketball teams.
“Frank had a legacy of being there first and implementing programs of significance,” said David Kiley, who was on the 1988 U.S. men’s wheelchair basketball team that Burns coached to a gold medal at the 1988 Paralympics in Seoul. “His dreams and visions always were bigger than those around him.”
Burns, 67, died Jan. 8 at the University of Chicago Medical Center of complications from a Dec. 11 heart attack, said his brother Peter. He had been a Woodlawn neighborhood resident.
Born in Beverly on the Southwest Side, Burns graduated from Brother Rice High School. He attended Olive-Harvey College for one term before transferring to the University of Wisconsin at Whitewater. There he got to know Dave Beetstra, who used a wheelchair as a result of a motorcycle accident at age 15.
Through Beetstra, who died in 2015, Burns became involved in a campus group, Students for an Accessible Society, and he drove a campus transportation bus for disabled people. Burns also helped coach the university’s wheelchair basketball team.
After graduating from University of Wisconsin at Whitewater in 1976 with a bachelor’s degree in speech and journalism, Burns in 1978 received a master’s degree in health, physical education and recreation from the University of Kentucky, where he helped develop the Wheel Kats, a men’s intercollegiate wheelchair basketball program, and the Lady Kats, a women’s team. He then was recruited by Casa Colina Hospital in Pomona, California, where he helped create the hospital’s wheelchair basketball teams for men and women.
In 1981, Burns returned to University of Wisconsin at Whitewater as a director of sports, adapted physical education and recreation. He coached the men’s wheelchair basketball team to a national championship in 1984.
In 1985, Burns moved to Birmingham, Alabama, to take a job as director of athletics at a group that advocates for people with disabilities, the Lakeshore Foundation, and helped develop a facility that is used as a training site for U.S. Olympic and Paralympic teams.
Burns’ work at the Lakeshore Foundation included developing wheelchair basketball programs and other sports programs for disabled youths, as well as raising money to support those programs. In addition to coaching the gold medalwinning U.S. men’s wheelchair basketball team at the Paralympic Games in 1988, Burns was the assistant coach of the bronze medalwinning U.S. team at the Paralympic Games in Sydney in 2000.
Burns also was assistant coach of the world championship-winning U.S. men’s wheelchair basketball game at the International Wheelchair Basketball Federation’s World Wheelchair Basketball Championship in Sydney in 1998.
In 1998, Burns was hired as athletic director and lacrosse coach at North Country Community College in Saranac Lake, New York, near Lake Placid. He returned to Chicago in 2000 as executive director of the National Wheelchair Basketball Association, raising money for the association and developed other fundraising programs.
“Wheelchair basketball is about more than just Xs and Os and national championships and gold medals — it’s about improving the quality of life of the people who play,” said Will Waller, the CEO of the National Wheelchair Basketball Association. “And at whatever event that Frank and I attended, he was always surrounded by a group of people who he impacted in the sport.”
After two years at the association, Burns was hired as a teacher at the Sonia Shankman Orthogenic School, which also is known as the “O-School.” Located on the campus of the University of Chicago, the school provides education for children and adolescents who are emotionally challenged or are autistic.
“He had been in a management role, and he was more of a guy who started programs and did a lot of coaching,” Peter Burns said. “His passion was at the O-School, working with kids with emotional problems. He was very passionate about coming up with games and physical activities — competitions that kids could excel in.”
Burns, who never retired, was inducted into the National Wheelchair Basketball Association Hall of Fame in 2008. After his death, the National Wheelchair Basketball Association created the Frank T. Burns Heritage Fund, which is aimed at providing funding for projects that preserve and display wheelchair basketball history and the association’s history.
Burns was a huge sports fan and enjoyed being an uncle of sorts to the children of “everyone he knew,” his brother said.
In addition to his brother, he is survived by two sisters, Mary Ellen Franger and Gini; and another brother, James.
Services were held.