Native Lebanon Paralympian partners with crypto company for NFT
Ryan Neiswender has lived his entire life with a disability, but that hasn’t stopped him from becoming one of the best athletes in his sport today. Now he wants to change the way society views people with disabilities.
“I often have people come up to me and say it’s so inspiring that you’re in the gym today,” said Neiswender, a Paralympic gold medalist. “It’s like, well where else would I be? Why is it inspiring that I am here?”
He said it’s like he shouldn’t be at the gym in the eyes of others. He believes that thinking comes from aging ideas and uneducated assumptions about what a disabled person is and what they are capable of doing.
“We’re fighting that uphill battle, you’re trying to convince people that I’m even a real athlete. It’s kind of ridiculous. I coach more than 90% of Americans in the sport I play and I am very good at it. I’m one of the best players in the world at it.
“The fact that I still have to explain it’s a big deal is what’s wrong with the whole situation, I think.”
Lebanon County High School Football:Palmyra vs. Lebanon highlights opening night
Lebanon City Council:Lebanon city officials provide additional training for police after fatal dog shooting
His journey has taken him all over the world and has opened doors to opportunities he has wanted since he started playing wheelchair basketball.
Now he has partnered with a cryptocurrency company in Harrisburg to try to educate others about how people are more than their disabilities with artwork depicting Paralympic athletes, created by disabled artists.
Neiswender, 28, was born and raised in Lebanon. He has congenital distal spinal muscular atrophy, which limits the ability to use his legs.
He began his athletic journey at a wheelchair basketball clinic in Philadelphia when he was 8 years old.
“I kind of started to realize that the things I knew I could do in sports, I was actually capable of and could do really well, because I had the mobility now.”
He described the realization as liberating and fell in love with the sport straight out of the clinic.
During high school he played for a travel team based out of Baltimore where he began to make a name for himself playing both regionally and nationally. That recognition turned into five athletic scholarship opportunities from colleges around the country.
He committed to the University of Illinois, where he played all four years of Division I wheelchair basketball and was a four-time All-American.
After college, Neiswender played professionally in Germany.
In 2020, Neiswender and Team USA won the gold medal in wheelchair basketball at the Paralympic Games in Tokyo.
He currently lives in Charlotte, North Carolina.
After taking home gold, he was approached by Fantokin, a cryptocurrency startup based in Harrisburg, to be featured in an NFT compilation highlighting Paralympic athletes. The Team Dromos 1.0 collection features four athletes from different Paralympic sports.
Neiswender, who worked for Visa, was familiar with the NFT space before being contacted by Fantokin, and was excited about the prospect.
An NFT is a type of online token where ownership of an individual asset is recorded on a digital ledger that allows it to be bought, sold and traded online with cryptocurrency.
The Dromos collection was published on August 19 and can be purchased at fantokin.com. Bidding for each NFT starts at $75, and each has 25 copies.
Neiswender worked closely with both Fantokin and his agent, Ish Tanyeri, to ensure the collection would send the right message about Paralympians and people with disabilities.
After countless hours of research in the NFT space, Tanyeri found a few articles that described how NFTs had the potential to be used as a place of inclusion and a way for underrepresented people to get their jobs.
They both decided that it was not only important to depict disabled athletes, but to have the images created by artists with disabilities as well.
“I really wanted to find the artist who could take this and shape this project for us, and those artists had to be from the community.” Tanyeri said, “These artists had to have a passion, just like my athletes, a passion to build an awareness and create inclusive spaces for people with disabilities.”
Tanyeri is the CEO of Dromos Agency, a talent management firm based in Boston that focuses exclusively on athletes with disabilities.
Tanyeri scoured social media to find artists with disabilities and worked with several before settling on two disabled artists, Rin Vanderhaeghe and Troy Lindstrom, both from Canada.
“I just don’t think a lot of people have tons of interactions with people with disabilities. If they do, they don’t know what to say, and they honestly don’t know what disabled people are capable of. So they hesitate to speak up because they don’t want to say the wrong thing, Neiswender said.
“I think what this does is it opens up to say there are disabled people who are artists, there are disabled athletes, there are disabled corporate America Fortune 500 people. Like we’re around you and we’re able to do wonderful things.”
Neiswender is currently preparing for the World Championships, which will take place in Dubai in November, as well as the 2024 Paralympic Games in Paris.
