Love, tragedy and Aria: Panthers receiver has always been the father he never had to be
In the spring of 2013, future Carolina Panther wide receiver Keith Kirkwood seemed to have everything.
A star athlete in both basketball and football, Kirkwood was a high school senior about to leave for the University of Hawaii on a football scholarship. He was an honor student. His relationship with his new girlfriend, Shayna Meggs, was going well, although they had only started dating a few weeks before.
Then Meggs introduced Kirkwood to Aria, her 1-year-old daughter.
Some teenage athletes on the verge of graduation and a full scholarship to Hawaii would have run for the hills at that point.
Kirkwood did the opposite.
“Aria was in the car when they first met,” Meggs said, “and when I drove up, Keith went right to the back of the car and just started talking to her. It was so natural. And I thought, ‘You know what? This could actually work.’ ”
Seven years later, Kirkwood, Meggs and Aria Nelson remain a tight trio — a family bonded by love and tragedy.
Kirkwood calls Aria his daughter. But he isn’t the 8-year-old’s biological father. That was Naisere Nelson, who drowned in the Atlantic Ocean in 2011 at age 15.
For the past seven years, though, Kirkwood has been Aria’s dad in every other way — baking cookies with her, taking her to paint-your-own-pottery studios, teaching her how to play tennis and, on this Sunday, celebrating Father’s Day with her.
Aria calls Kirkwood “Kiwi.” For Father’s Day, she’s making him a homemade card and has picked out black-and-blue balloons to match the colors of his new NFL team.
Said Kirkwood: “The beauty that comes out of my daughter every day — that’s what I live for.”
I was talking with new Panthers head coach Matt Rhule recently and asked him if he knew of any stories about Carolina’s many new players worth telling.
“Do you know the one about Keith Kirkwood and his daughter?” Rhule said. “Because that one is pretty amazing.”
I didn’t know the story then.
It turned out Rhule was right.
‘One of the nicest people’
Kirkwood was one of the first free agents the Panthers signed under Rhule, coming aboard in mid-March. He’s a little like Forrest Gump for this Carolina squad, because he seems to have a connection to nearly everyone. Kirkwood played under Rhule and several of the Panthers’ other new assistant coaches at Temple. There he caught passes from P.J. Walker, currently one of Carolina’s backup quarterbacks.
Kirkwood, 25, spent his first two NFL seasons at New Orleans, where he overlapped with both Carolina’s offensive coordinator Joe Brady and their starting quarterback, Teddy Bridgewater.
“First of all, Keith is truly one of the nicest people I’ve ever had a chance to coach,” Rhule said. “We want guys like that here. But he also is a very smart player who can learn all three wideout positions and will contribute for us on special teams. He can do a lot of different jobs.”
On a Panthers team with a solid top three of wide receivers in DJ Moore, Robby Anderson and Curtis Samuel, Kirkwood knows that his chances of contributing to the team quickly will depend on his special-teams play and versatility. A big receiver at 6-foot-3 and 210 pounds, Kirkwood is a good blocker in the run game.
“I’m an intelligent player,” Kirkwood said. “I’m not the fastest. I’m not Tyreek Hill or Robby Anderson, taking the top off every single play. But I know how to get open and make the quarterback right every time.”
At New Orleans in 2018, he made the Saints as an undrafted rookie free agent out of Temple. He ended up making several huge plays as a receiver for the Saints late in the season, including a touchdown in a playoff victory and two big third-down catches from Drew Brees in a Monday night win over Carolina.
In 2019, hampered by a nagging hamstring injury, Kirkwood barely played at all. The Saints parted ways with him after that, and Carolina signed him to a one-year deal worth a reported $800,000 for 2020. Kirkwood said he had several other options, but picked the Panthers in large part due to Rhule.
“I always told myself that if I ever had an opportunity to be back with Coach Rhule that I was going to do it,” Kirkwood said. “His former players all knew that if he ever got to the NFL that he would maybe go down as a legend.”
Tragedy at the Jersey shore
Kirkwood remembers the day he first met Aria in 2013 as one of the most significant moments of his life. It was in New Jersey, where he and his girlfriend went to Neptune High together. Although he had a sterling reputation, Kirkwood said he was also attracted to mischief.
Said Kirkwood: “I wasn’t the best kid. ... I ultimately did hang around a lot of people who weren’t the right crowd. And sometimes I would do knucklehead things.”
A mutual friend set Kirkwood and Meggs up for their first date, which was also the senior prom.
Two years earlier, as a sophomore, Meggs had gotten pregnant by her then-boyfriend, Nelson. Then Nelson had accidentally drowned on June 9, 2011, while swimming off the New Jersey shore along with several other members of the football team. Meggs was also at the beach that day.
Nelson, who had played high school football and enjoyed writing poetry, was likely the victim of a riptide, according to the Asbury Park Press. There were no lifeguards on the beach at the time of his drowning. His body was recovered five days later.
Kirkwood was vaguely aware of this tragedy. He knew Nelson a little, but Kirkwood was a basketball player only at the time.
Meggs decided to have the baby. Aria was born seven months later, in early 2012, when Meggs was a high school junior. She stayed in high school and began to raise her child with the help of her parents and Nelson’s family.
A coach’s prediction
Meanwhile, Kirkwood was drawing some basketball recruiting interest from lower-level Division I schools.
The football coach at Neptune High at the time was a veteran of the business named Mark Ciccotelli. He was intrigued by the 6-3 forward with great body control who was slamming home two-handed dunks in Neptune’s basketball games. He had also gotten to know Kirkwood enough to realize “he’s as good a human being as you’re ever going to find.” Ciccotelli badly wanted to coach him.
“I bothered him a couple of times about playing football,” Ciccotelli said. “We talked a little bit. He said once, ‘Well, coach, how good do you think I could be?’ I said, ‘Listen, football’s a lot different. You put a helmet on, you’re going to get hit. It’s violent. But if you can check that box, you’re a scholarship kid. And I think you could be in the NFL someday.’ ”
Kirkwood’s eyes widened; he was sold. His parents? Not so much. He had put so much time into basketball already. Kirkwood said he had one of his aunts forge a permission slip, signing his mother’s name, so he could begin practicing.
Before he played in a real game — and he was only a part of the high school football team as a senior — Kirkwood played in a 7-on-7 high school scrimmage. On the first play, Ciccotelli told Kirkwood to run a shallow cross. “What’s that?” Kirkwood asked.
Told to sprint from his receiving position to a spot 6 yards directly in front of the quarterback, Kirkwood did so, caught the ball and ran 60 more yards for a touchdown. Neptune went for two, and Kirkwood out-jumped a smaller cornerback for the ball in the end zone.
Before long, his parents were on board. The scholarship offer to Hawaii materialized. Kirkwood took it.
A few months later, Kirkwood and Meggs were set up by a mutual friend to go to the senior prom.
“And about a month into me and Shayna’s relationship,” Kirkwood said, “she ended up introducing me to Aria. I literally looked at her (Aria’s) eyes and my whole life took a complete U-turn. And I went from a young boy to a man.”
A secret commute
It wasn’t a fairy tale right away. Kirkwood went to Hawaii and quickly got homesick, missing his girlfriend and Aria. He stuck it out for a year with the help of a friend he made on the team named Willis Wilson, a happy-go-lucky running back.
Then Wilson died in late 2013 — he was also the victim of a drowning accident. Kirkwood was devastated and still homesick. He decided to transfer.
Rhule came into the picture then. Temple, in Philadelphia, was only about a 90-minute drive from Kirkwood’s hometown, and the Owls were the only team to offer Kirkwood a full scholarship as a transfer. He took it.
Temple provided a place for Kirkwood to live, but he wanted to see his girlfriend and Aria so badly he would spend the night several times a week with them at Meggs’ parents.
“I’d leave at 4 a.m. from New Jersey and drive all the way back to Temple,” Kirkwood said. “I’d get there at 5:30 a.m. Workouts, practices, class, study hall — all that stuff. Then I’d drive back and get home at 8 or 8:30, and the next morning, I’d start over. I did that 3-4 times a week. On the weekends, I was home being a dad. I didn’t go to parties or clubs. I was home, with Aria and Shayna. The coaches didn’t know I was going back and forth so much, though. I was basically commuting from another state.”
Told this, Rhule chuckled.
“Yeah, I didn’t know that,” Rhule said. “He hid that from me. But every time Keith was supposed to be somewhere for us, he always was.”
23 texted photos
Rhule went on to rebuild the football program at Temple and then at Baylor before getting hired by the Panthers. Kirkwood finished a solid career at Temple, went undrafted, made the Saints roster as an undrafted agent and stuck there for two years until Carolina signed him.
Now Rhule and Kirkwood are together again.
“One thing about this job I have is that I work with a lot of people who are just beginning to be fathers,” said Rhule, who along with his wife Julie has three young children. “I will tell you that Keith has always been a special player and a special father — not just in word, but in deed.”
Kirkwood and his longtime girlfriend Meggs have been together for seven years now. She still lives in New Orleans, along with Aria and Kirkwood (who will move to Charlotte soon). Meggs is a nurse who works with cardiac patients. Aria just finished the second grade. They hope to all move to Charlotte eventually, if Kirkwood can play well enough this year to secure a longer contract with Carolina.
Kirkwood said he would one day like to officially adopt Aria, although he wants to wait until she’s older so she can have a bigger part in that decision. He still keeps in touch with the family of Nelson, the biological father, he said. Aria sees those relatives occasionally, Meggs said.
I asked Kirkwood for a couple of photos to help illustrate this story. A few minutes later, my phone started pinging.
Kirkwood didn’t send a couple of photos. He sent 23.
He gets a little carried away when the subject is Aria, as so many parents do about their children. And on Father’s Day, he is particularly thankful for her.
“When I was 18 years old, I met Aria Nelson,” Kirkwood said. “And she’s the best thing that has ever happened to me.”
This story was originally published June 21, 2020 at 6:00 AM with the headline "Love, tragedy and Aria: Panthers receiver has always been the father he never had to be."
