In the fall of 2007, I was 26 years old and had just been named head coach at Gettysburg College. Gino Frank applied to be my part-time assistant. We met for the first time in his social studies classroom at Mechanicsburg Middle School. He was interested in college coaching, and I needed an assistant to help me rebuild the team I had just joined that only had ten wrestlers on the roster. His excitement and passion for wrestling and coaching were obvious from our first meeting, and I was really lucky he decided to join the team. He was my only applicant, and I do not know what I would have done without him.
We spent the next 13 years coaching together at Gettysburg. Every day, he would rush out of school, get in his oversized pickup, and drive 35 minutes south to Gettysburg. He usually managed to get there during the warmup, and he brought plenty of passion to everything we did, whether it was teaching technique, working out with an All-American heavyweight, or running extra conditioning or mental preparation for anyone who wanted to stay after practice. A few days each season, he had to miss practice for parent-teacher conferences at the middle school. These were his least favorite days of the year, and he never stopped complaining about how they made him miss practice. His energy always astounded me, as he would go to school early to run the weight room for the kids at Mechanicsburg, drive to Gettysburg for practice, drive home and do whatever he did to get ready for the next day, and then do it all again. I truly do not know how he kept doing it for years. I know I would not have lasted.
One of the reasons he kept showing up and gave up his nights and weekends for very little money or possibly even less recognition was loyalty. If I am ever asked to describe Gino, his loyalty immediately springs to mind. He kept coming all those years because he made a commitment and cared about the people he worked with. He showed up at the Mechanicsburg weight room to work with wrestlers, baseball players, water polo players, and whoever else wanted to work out before school because he cared about helping them get better. He did not coach any of their teams, but he was as committed to their success as ours at Gettysburg. He would coach anyone who needed it. He worked with his club team, Modern Day Gladiators, and would take anyone to any tournament. He sometimes did private lessons with wrestlers he knew that were not considering Gettysburg and never gave us a second look, and he would do it for free because they needed his help and wanted to work hard. I could always count on him to do whatever the team needed, even if I did not ask him to. I think back to a time when he turned all the showers in the locker room on as hot as they would go and started handfighting with a wrestler to help him make weight. Nobody asked him for that—he just knew that his guy needed to make weight.
When I found out that Gino had passed, one of the first things my wife said was, “I hope they are having his funeral in a big place.” I do not know if I could say anything about Gino that describes him better than that. I saw firsthand the impact he had on the wrestlers at Gettysburg. He was always relentlessly positive about the guys. He always believed they had a chance to win, no matter the opponent. I was always the more realistic one (he probably would have called it pessimistic, but he supported me too much to say so). His positivity absolutely rubbed off on the wrestlers and helped them to have confidence in their abilities. In his mind, he never coached a bad team, because he always had faith that his wrestlers would prevail. Reality could never dampen his spirits, and a loss was just a chance to do some more coaching. I have seen many tributes to Gino in the days since his passing, and they all sound a lot like this one.
In early 2023, Gino was diagnosed with stage IV lung cancer, and he outlasted any prediction about his future. He managed to make his way back onto the Pennsylvania national coaching staff in Fargo and went to Greece this summer to coach one of his wrestlers in the U17 Greco-Roman world championships. I am thrilled that he was able to get back onto the mat and continue to do what he loved to do almost until the end. Missing a few practices for parent-teacher conferences is nothing compared to giving up coaching altogether even if only temporarily.
Gino had a lot of friends across the country, and I am glad I could count myself as one of them. I am also glad to have this website where I can share just a little bit about the hundreds of hours we spent together in practice, on the bus, and in gyms around Division III wrestling. He will be sorely missed, but he will never be forgotten.
