This College Basketball Sensation Lost Most of His Left Arm in an Accident 16 Years Ago. Now He’s Dreaming of the NBA

Mar. 15, 2025

Hansel Enmanuel 2024 Austin Peay basketball photo.Photo:Alex Allard

Alex Allard

Just three days after having surgery on his knee following an injury last November, college basketball player Hansel Enmanuel was back on his feet and running around in his apartment, recalls his coach, Corey Gipson, who then holds up his cell phone in a Zoom call with PEOPLE to show video proof of the 6 foot 6 inch tall athlete bounding up a staircase.

“Hansel’s turnaround has been faster than anybody I’ve ever coached who had those types of surgeries,” Gipson, the head coach of Enmanuel’s Austin Peay State University Governors basketball team in Clarksville, Tenn., says. “It’s remarkable.”

Hansel Enmanuel #24 of the Austin Peay Governors in November 2024.Johnnie Izquierdo/Getty Images

Johnnie Izquierdo/Getty Images

Enmanuel was executing a play just like that one during a late-November game when he made a bad landing and — for the first time in his career — was sidelined with a knee injury.

“The doctor told me that I got to pull my part,” Enmanuel says. “So I think that was the key, me doing my extra work, just rehab and stuff. And I think I did a pretty decent job.”

Enmanuel’s swift recovery comes as no surprise given the course of his life since that fateful accident in 2009.

“My background is really, really dark,” he says.

Gipson tapped him to play for Louisiana’s Northwestern State University in 2022, and both coach and player have since moved on to Austin Peay, where they’ve grown even closer.

“I’m becoming a better person, growing up, and I’m glad that I met this man next to me,” Enmanuel says, pointing to Gipson.

Hansel Enmanuel (far right) with his father and grandmother.Courtesy Hansel Enmanuel

Courtesy Hansel Enmanuel

Recently, Enmanuel and Gipson made time after a game to meet with a teenager who had a prosthetic limb.

“Hansel said to him, ‘I just want you to know that you can be anything you want to be in life and never let anybody tell you you can’t,’ ” Gipson recalls. “When he walks out to the court to warm up, Hansel has the loudest voice, and everybody in the arena knows it. The energy just changes once he enters the room. He’s leading in an on-and-off-the-court way, and that wasn’t always the case when he was younger.”

But when he’s on the court, the athlete has only one goal in mind.

“Get to the NBA,” he says.

And now that the rising star is back in dunk-making form, taking his team into its conference tournament, Gipson is optimistic.

“I give him another week or so,” he says, “and you’ll probably be seeing him onSportsCenter Top 10.”

source: people.com