A spinal cord injury suffered while playing foodball weakened Trenton Bass physically, but strengthened his spirit and his faith in God
When Trenton Bass was lying in a hospital bed in Sioux Falls nine years ago, his future life flashed in front of his eyes. It wasn’t the life he had planned for.
Bass, then a running back on the Hills-Beaver Creek football team, found himself in the hospital after a spinal cord injury he sustained in his team’s second game of the 2017 season in Mountain Lake.
Playing defense, his head was forcefully hit by the runner’s leg as he dove for a tackle. The game was nearly over, just 90 seconds to go.
His football career ended on that play. There was no pain, and having suffered “stingers” before, Bass didn’t think much of it, even as he was wearing a neck brace as he was carted off the field and to a hospital 20 miles away in Windom.
“When I was laying on the field, my teammates came up to talk to me … it wasn’t like me to be laying on the ground,” Bass said during his presentation at Sunday’s Tracy Area Fellowship of Christian Athletes kick-off event. “I think they could tell something was wrong right away.”
There was, but what Bass felt as he lay on his back was a sense of calm and peace.
Bass was airlifted to Sioux Falls Avera Hospital, where he underwent a CT scan before a six-hour surgery was performed to decompress his spinal cord. The broken vertebrae — C5 and C6 — were pinching Bass’ spinal cord, preventing him from moving.
It wasn’t until that helicopter ride to Sioux Falls that Bass realized what had happened — not the medical details of his injury, but the overall impact it had on him.
“That’s when I broke down for the first time crying,” he said. “I didn’t know what the future held. I was scared not knowing what was going on.”
Bass’ father, brothers, and sister-in-law drove from the game to Sioux Falls, and made it there before he went into surgery at about 1:30 a.m. — roughly four hours after the incident.
“Basically what happened was, when the bones broke, they were putting pressure on my spinal cord, cutting off blood flow,” he said. “They took one of the bones out and kind of made a new one, and put that in with some titanium rods.”
Bass said his friends and family helped him make it through the early stages of his recovery in the hospital.
“They treated me like nothing ever happened from day one,” he said. “As days turned into weeks … the conversations with the doctors started getting more serious. I wasn’t getting any function, any feeling back.”
Bass joked that his first question of the doctors after surgery was if he’ll be able to drive again. Today, he has no feeling from his breastbone down, making him a quadriplegic. He can move his arms, but not his fingers. He said he has learned to maneuver and do things by figuring out how to do it differently.
• Bass has not let his injury stop him — on the contrary. Not knowing what the rest of his life would look like, his physical therapy started at Craig Hospital in Colorado, which is known for its teen rehab program.
“I knew I was going to do everything that I could to just get better,” he said.
Healing has taken on different meanings for Bass. While he worked hard to improve physically, he knew he had to take care of himself mentally and spiritually as well, and that meant turning to scripture. It wasn’t until high school that he started taking his faith more seriously, and his faith has been tested more than he ever could’ve imagined. He was an FCA leader in high school, so he had some background in his faith, but it wasn’t until his injury that he knew what it means to truly rely on God.
“I not going to be able to control what happens,” he said. “But I knew that I could just try my best every day.”
One Bible verse that came to mean a lot to him is from Philippians 4, 6-7: “Don’t worry about anything, instead pray about everything. Tell God what you need and thank him for all that he’s done. You will experience his peace, which exceeds anything you will understand.” He said those words epitomize what he was going through.
• Bass went on to graduate from H-BC, then from South Dakota State University, earning a degree in mechanical engineering. A few weeks after graduation in May 2022, he got a job as a design engineer at Raven Industries, an agriculture company in Sioux Falls.
In addition to being employed full time, Bass has been spending time working at his family’s nonprofit, Game Plan 4 Hope, which the Bass family created after the accident to help families whose lives have been turned upside down by a life-changing event.
