The married-with-kids Manhattan private-school coach who says he was fired by a lesbian athletic director for being straight told The Post he wouldn’t give up his traditional lifestyle for the world.
“I’ve got to figure out how to take care of this chapter financially,” Gregory Kenney, 50, said from his Long Island home. “But I have three beautiful, healthy kids and a fantastic wife,” he added, the day after he filed a reverse-discrimination suit against the prestigious Trinity School on W. 91st Street.
Kenney, who’d taught at the school for 15 years, became a target of new Athletic Director Pat Krieger, 53, who demanded that he coach more sports than required by his contract, according to the suit.
When Kenney griped he couldn’t work a 70-hour week and be a devoted dad, Krieger allegedly replied that he wasn’t being a team player.
She did not make similar demands on single female coaches, the lawsuit says.
Krieger allegedly told Kenney, “We all make choices” and reported him to the headmaster.
“That’s discrimination,” Kenney’s attorney Steven Morelli said. “They treated him differently based upon who he was, which is illegal.”
Krieger and another boss allegedly told Kenney he didn’t fit in with their “culture.”
The soccer, basketball and golf coach says in his suit that Krieger “routinely favored other single, younger females without children and discriminated against [him] because of his gender, sexual orientation and traditional family status.”
“If I was single and didn’t have the family commitments, I would love to have coached more ball,” the now-unemployed dad said Thursday.
“But that’s not where I was, and I made it clear to her, and her response was, ‘This detracts from your value to the school.’ ”
Trinity Headmaster John Allman, who previously worked with Krieger at a Texas prep school, called Kenney’s allegations “entirely baseless and utterly false” in an e-mail to the school community Thursday. School spokesman Kevin Ramsey declined to comment on behalf of Trinity and Krieger.
The posh prep school costs nearly $40,000 a year and counts Humphrey Bogart and Oliver Stone among its alumni.
“He was a good gym teacher,” said an 11-year-old student leaving school with her nanny. “He was nice and funny. He wasn’t strict. He was like a friend.”
A 16-year-old male student added, “He was friendly to everyone and was into his work.”
Additional reporting by Tara Palmeri and Priscilla DeGregory