By Deborah Kevin, MA, founder of DearJoePa.org | May 13, 2026
There is a phrase so woven into the fabric of Penn State that it precedes introductions, crosses generations, and travels with alumni to every corner of the world. Two words that carry the weight of a covenant:
We Are…
You finish it without thinking: Penn State.
But this summer, as Rise Above—Friends of Adaptive Athletics at Penn State—gathers for its third annual fundraiser, chaired by Sue Paterno and Dana Harris, those two words open into something larger. Something that explains why Penn State legends fly in from across the country to stand before a room of strangers and ask them to donate. Why a father drives his son five hours round trip every week for years. Why a room full of alumni who never met these athletes will reach into their pockets for them anyway.
We are family. And family shows up.
The Man at the Mic
The keynote speaker at the 2026 Rise Above fundraiser is Terry Smith: Penn State football legend, devoted coach, and father to his daughter Haley, a graduate of Penn State’s WorkLink program, whom he describes, simply, as his everything.
Terry Smith has spent his adult life building people up—on the field, in the film room, in the lives of young men learning what it means to compete, to lose, to get back up. He knows, from the inside, what it means to love someone whose path through the world requires a different kind of support. He knows what showing up looks like, not as a philosophy but as a practice: the alarm clocks, the advocacy, the ordinary Tuesday mornings that don’t make the highlight reel but hold everything together.
This is who Rise Above calls to its stage: not celebrities, but witnesses. People who have seen, up close, what these athletes are made of—and who cannot stay quiet about it.
Show Up Like You Mean It
You know how to show up for Penn State. You’ve done it your whole life.
You’ve packed into Beaver Stadium on a white-out Saturday, 106,000 people breathing the same cold air, and felt something move through the crowd that has no name but that every Penn Stater recognizes. You’ve stood in Rec Hall and watched the volleyball team fight to a fifth set with the noise climbing the walls. You’ve been to Pegula Ice Arena and watched Penn State hockey play with the kind of intensity that makes you forget it’s a Tuesday.
You showed up for those athletes. You believed your presence mattered. And it did.
Penn State Adaptive Athletics athletes train just as seriously. They compete with the same heart. They wear the same blue and white. The only difference is where they play—and who fills the seats.
On July 25, you don’t have to find the sled hockey rink or the adapted track. You just have to find the Penn Stater Hotel. The showing up is the same. The family is the same.
What Family Looks Like
Family is not sentiment. It is action. It is the specific, unglamorous, repetitive work of showing up.
Max Malec’s father drove from the Scranton area to State College every Sunday morning for years—two and a half hours one way—so that Max could skate with the State College Coyotes sled hockey program. Then they drove home. Then they did it again. When Max enrolled at Penn State, his dad kept showing up, skating alongside him in practice, going home with sore knees and tired arms.
Max talks about his father with the kind of love that only sounds like teasing. He also talks about his mother: “She endured, I kid you not, for three and a half years, hell on earth, with a smile on her face every single day. She showed up for me, came to my games, overcame those chemo treatments. She is my why.”
Max’s mother died of stage four colon cancer in 2016. He was a child. But she had already given him something that cannot be taken: the model of a person who shows up, smiling, even when the cost is staggering. Max carries her into every practice, every tournament, every word he speaks to a room full of strangers who, by the end, are not strangers at all.
Jack Cunningham was born without fibulas in both legs. Amputated at age one, he cannot remember a life before prosthetics. What he can remember is third grade—his first running blades, and taking off down a track. “It’s so freeing. I just fell in love with track. Not because there’s some hidden passion in it all along, but because I had finally been able to run with my teammates, my friends.”
He is now a sprinter, a triathlete, a captain, and a Penn Stater. His goal is to represent Penn State at the LA 2028 Paralympic Games. The best time to plant a tree, he told the room at last year’s gala, was twenty years ago. The second-best time is now.
Standing on Each Other’s Shoulders
Penn State football legend Lydell Mitchell grew up, he says, not knowing he was poor. There was food on the table and a plan to join the Air Force. What changed his trajectory was sport, and the scholarship it offered, and the community it opened. “We stand on the shoulders of those guys before us. The opportunity, and to respect what other guys did before me, and to try to just make things better and better for the next generation—that’s how I always looked at sports.”
When Mitchell came to the 2025 Rise Above Gala, he came because someone asked, and because the ask mattered. “Time is valuable,” he said, “but this is very important to a lot of people and also to myself.”
Penn State hockey head coach Guy Gadowsky saw compound generosity up close when player Dylan Lugris attended a sled hockey practice and came back with a vision: let the sled hockey team play a real game in front of the student section. Three years later, with every member of the Penn State hockey team contributing—coaching, refereeing, running the PA, playing—Lugris had raised over $60,000 for the Coyotes program. The roster tripled. They recruited from across the country. “You get a bunch of people that believe in the culture of success with honor,” Gadowsky said in 2025, “and amazing things happen.”
What We Learn from Them
There is a quiet inversion that happens when you spend time with adaptive athletes. You arrive thinking about what they need. You leave thinking about what you lack.
Brenna O’Connor, director of Penn State Adaptive Athletics, spent thirty years as a PE teacher and coach before she found what she now calls her voice. She coaches sprinters, throwers, sled hockey players, and triathletes—a class that is, by any measure, the most talented in the program’s new era. She says that when people see her athletes compete, they are going to turn heads. She is not speaking metaphorically.
Sue Paterno put it directly at the 2025 event. Many of us, she observed, have had surgery at some point—a knee, a hip, a shoulder. We remember counting the days until we could play golf again. For us, it was temporary. For adaptive athletes, the challenge is every day—and yet they are not diminished by it. They are enlarged by it. “In a world that doesn’t inspire hope, our adaptive athletes inspire others to overcome barriers, and they show others how to beat all odds. Challenges be damned.”
We Are Penn State. We Are Family.
Lydell Mitchell said it plainly: “I see people in the Baltimore area where I live, and they’re Penn Staters. And I say, ‘Hey, we’re family, man.’”
That’s the whole thing, really. It doesn’t matter how long ago you graduated, whether you ever played a sport, or whether you know a single one of these athletes by name. You are Penn State. That means you stand on the shoulders of those who came before you and offer your shoulders to those coming up.
Terry Smith knows this. He has lived it at every level—as a player, as a coach, as a father. He will stand at that podium on July 25 and ask you to believe what he believes: that the family is only as strong as its commitment to every member of it.
These athletes—Jack and Max, and all who will come after them—are Penn Staters. Same blue and white. Same values. Same impossible standards of excellence.
They are your people. Show up for them.
Individual tickets are $125 and are sale now. Purchase your tickets here https://pennstateriseabove.org/fundraiser last year they sold out quickly.
