mfreter@mavs.coloradomesa.edu

The ultimate goal of any aspiring high school athlete is to play in college.

The only obstacles he might face come in the form of recruiting and getting his name out to the right people. For sophomore CMU basketball player Daniel Estes, the challenge was to recover from a potential career-ending injury.

During his junior year at Laramie High School in Wyoming, Estes sustained a severe injury to his left hand while skiing just outside of his hometown. What started out as a routine trip down the slopes went south as he crashed after going off of a jump. He wasn’t sure how bad the damage was until later.

“I went off a jump and fell doing a trick that I would usually land,” Estes said. “There was something wrong with my binding, so my ski came off when I fell. I knew I got hit in the hand, so I took off my glove and turned my hand over, and the backside of it was gushing blood.”

What he didn’t know at the time was that the ski that came loose during his fall had severed all of the tendons in his left hand. Fortunately, his mom had skied down the same run and was waiting for him at the bottom. When she saw him coming down the slope, she knew something was wrong. After medics bandaged his wound, Estes and his mom drove home through terrible weather for more medical attention.

“She had to drive me 45 minutes back to Laramie through a blizzard just to get me to the emergency room,” Estes said. “If she wouldn’t have been there I don’t know what would have happened.”

After having his damaged hand examined by doctors, he learned that he was going to need reconstructive surgery to repair the ligaments that had been split in half. The procedure successfully mended the damaged tendons by infusing plastic with the tendons in order to hold them together until they fully healed.

Although the injury had been fixed, the effects of the procedure came with a serious consequence. Doctors explained to Estes that his chances of playing basketball again were very slim.

“[The doctor] said there was a chance, but he didn’t want me to be let down if I wasn’t able to play,” Estes said. “He told me that if I was going to play, it was going to take a lot of rehab, which is exactly what I did.”

For the next three months, Estes underwent daily rehabilitation. He did different exercises with his hand that worked on his strength and range of motion, and he was able to return to the court for his senior season. During that season, he played so well that he received an offer to play at CMU from head coach Jim Heaps.

“It was an amazing feeling,” Estes said. “I felt like a little kid. I was so excited. It was pretty cool to come back from that injury to achieve my goal of playing college basketball.”

Estes and the rest of the men’s basketball team take the court Nov. 23 for their home opener at the Clarion Inn Thanksgiving Classic in Brownson Arena.