LEXINGTON, Ky. (LEX 18) — David Hartsek readily admits he was doing stuff he shouldn’t have been doing on that fateful night when he was 16 years old.
“(I) ended up having a wreck and breaking my back, my leg, arm, punctured a lung, ruptured a spleen and all of that”, recalls Hartsek. “I was in pretty rough condition.”
Some might have seen that tragedy as the end of possibilities, but for Hartsek it turned out to be just the beginning. Never interested much in sports before, athletics became a focal point of his life.
"I learned at an early age to work for what you want," says Hartsek. “Even after I got the injury that put me in a wheelchair, I still didn’t lose that passion for working for what I wanted and that drive just kinda kept me going.
“(I) ended up going to Eastern Kentucky rehab and did some rehab there. Got introduced to basketball. Most people go to therapy and all that. I went to the basketball court, tennis court, got in my racing chair. That was my therapy.”
David didn’t just compete. He excelled in road racing and winning championships in tennis, winning his division in the Bluegrass 10K multiple times, and being a member of UK’s national wheelchair basketball championship team in 2008.
“I’m competitive, you know. I’m kind of quiet and all that. But whether the gun goes off and you’re ready for a race or the ball goes up to start a game, then game on. It may not be something nice, but I’m very competitive.”
David doesn’t compete much anymore. Now that he’s retired after a 30-plus year career in IT and with his two daughters having grown up and moved away, he’s turning his attention instead to coaching. He guides a team in Louisville on weekends and is working on establishing wheelchair basketball teams in Owensboro. All the while reminding everyone to never give up and to look for new challenges.
“I kept my dreams and my goals and I can go back today and look at what I was thinking at 13, 14, 15 years old and I can check those boxes off and say ‘yeah, I’ve done that.' I would encourage anyone that, you know, just because of a disability and illness or whatever, you know, don’t give up your goals. Don’t let people steal them.”
