Hockey Player ‘Lost Everything’ After Hit Left Him Paralyzed (Exclusive)

Reese Ketler remembers the exact date of his injury.

The young hockey star was born in Winnipeg, Manitoba, and like many Canadian kids, hockey was his entire world. He played for his public high school’s team before graduating to the St. Vital Victorias, a junior ice hockey team in his hometown, where he earned rookie of the year in his first season.

On Dec. 19, 2019, Ketler was on the rink in the midst of his second season, his mom cheering on her youngest son from the stands. He secured the puck, made an end-to-end rush and took a shot at the goal — but he collided with a member of the opposing team and was sent headfirst into the rink’s boards.

“I was on the ice,” Ketler recalls of the moment in an interview with PEOPLE. “I knew something was very wrong.”

He wasn’t quite in pain — he now thinks it was probably the adrenaline rushing through his body — but when he tried to stand, his body wouldn’t let him. The trainer arrived at the scene to check his condition, and they could immediately tell his injury was serious: the game was called off, firefighters arrived and an ambulance was prepped to transport him to the hospital.

It’s all a blur, he says, but several moments stick in Ketler’s mind from the next whirlwind 12 hours. 

He remembers his legs going completely numb, so much so that he couldn’t even tell as the trainers cut the skates off his body. He remembers arriving at the hospital, where his entire family — parents, cousins, aunts, uncles and grandparents — were there to see him. And he remembers the prayers he said to God as he waited for the doctors to treat him.

“I was like, ‘Please, I am not ready to go like this,’ ” Ketler says. “My faith was really restored in that moment.”

At the hospital, Ketler learned he had severely injured his spinal cord, and he was rushed into surgery. But in the minutes before, his doctor told him words that would continue to inspire him over the next five years: “You probably won’t walk again, but you can still be successful. This won’t change the outcome of your life as long as you’re motivated to take ownership of it.”

“I felt like I had lost everything I had worked towards in that split-second play,” Ketler tells PEOPLE. “But that really stuck with me.”

Out of surgery six hours later, Ketler began the long road to recovery.

“I just remember being so sore,” he says. “My neck was in the most pain I’ve ever been in.”

Ketler spent four days in the intensive care unit and then another 10 in the step-down unit before he was transported to a rehab facility. For the first week in rehab, his fingers were so swollen that he couldn’t move them at all, says Ketler, but the words of the doctor rang in his ears.

“I was really just grinding as hard as I could,” he says. 

Before the hit, Ketler had a decent amount of muscle mass from his intensive training schedule and working in landscaping the summer before, which his doctors would later tell him probably saved his life. In rehab, he hit the gym twice a day with his physiotherapists, determined to regain his lost muscle. His hands had also been paralyzed in the injury, so he started by picking up and throwing small beads, slowly regaining his fine motor skills.

But recovery in rehab was a huge adjustment. 

“It was really depressing for the first year after my injury because I went from my healthy, active life to no more seeing my friends every day at the hockey rink,” says Ketler.

He had to drop out of university because he was unable to attend classes. And though he typically had regular visitors — his brother, for instance, would often get in trouble with the nurses for trying to stay at the rehab facility later than their open hours — once the COVID-19 pandemic started a few months in, the building was locked down and nobody could come to see him.

“I could only FaceTime family and friends,” he says. “That was a really tough month for me because I go from seeing my friends and family supporting me to me being in the hospital alone.”

Though he was initially slated to stay in rehab for six months, he beat expectations for his recovery and was able to finally return home two months early, moving back into his parents’ house in Winnipeg. 

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“I had to learn to do everything from scratch, because everything I did before, I’d have to do in a different way,” says Ketler: how to transfer himself from his bed to his wheelchair, how to use the washroom and even how to open a jar or soda can.

Before his injury, he had his driver’s license and could go wherever he pleased; now, he’d have to wait for others to drive him.

“It almost felt like I went back to being a baby, in a way,” he says. 

From the beginning, Ketler tells PEOPLE, his “biggest goal” was to “get independent.”

He trained with a spinal cord injury specialist — working in the gym three days a week, both to lift weights and to practice everyday motions, like moving from the edge of the bed into a wheelchair. As the pandemic subsided, Ketler also joined a wheelchair rugby club, rediscovering his love for athletics, and he officially made Team Canada a year and a half later.

“It’s so good to have some sort of community,” he says of his teammates. “When you listen to people that have been in a wheelchair for 30-plus years, they know a lot more than what a doctor knows because that’s the life they live every day. Being around a group of people that are in your same situation — where you can talk about things that you wouldn’t normally talk to with a doctor or your able-bodied friends — really helped me a lot in my recovery and just showed me that your life isn’t over.”

Throughout his recovery, Ketler also tried his hand at social media, sharing the outfits he’d wear in his wheelchair. (“I think I was probably the only one doing fit checks in a wheelchair on TikTok at the time, so it was kind of original,” he laughs.)

In March 2024, when Ketler first started to take his social media career seriously, he estimates he had roughly 4,000 TikTok followers — but in the year and a half since, that number has since exploded to over 364,000, with a total like count nearing 20 million.

“I just kind of just grinded it,” he says, humbly. “I showed people that I was confident in who I was.”

With the revenue from his content creation and the strength he had regained in the gym, Ketler finally was able to move from his parents’ house into an apartment on his own, four and a half years after his injury — a goal of his from the beginning.

It wasn’t an easy transition by any means. None of the units in his apartment building were accessible, so he needed to make several modifications to be able to live in the space with a wheelchair. Ketler also had to get used to the typical elements of life on your own as an adult: making food, doing the dishes and folding laundry.

“To be honest, the first month was a big change,” he says. “I’m glad I did it because I like to get out of my comfort zone.”

But even though Ketler, now 25, lives almost entirely independently, he is adamant that he could have only done it with the support of so many others in his life — his family, the hockey community and even the city of Winnipeg.

“It wasn’t just me that did this all,” he says. “It was the whole community that supported me in my recovery to be able to live this type of life.”

He adds: “I’m really lucky to be in the position where I can create content and inspire people and show other people’s spinal cord injuries that your life isn’t over.”