Ryan Ladika/MDN Hunter Pinke spoke to student-athletes at Minot High School Wednesday evening, sharing his story and hoping to help those in attendance with struggles in their lives.

Hunter Pinke was a former University of North Dakota tight end who began his sporting career doing everything in his power to follow in the Division I footsteps of his grandfather. A skiing accident a couple of years ago set him on a new course, though, one he would not give up even if given the chance.

As he was growing up, Pinke, a native of Wishek, North Dakota, wanted nothing more than to be just like his grandfather, Fred Lukens. Lukens played basketball for the Fighting Hawks from 1972 to 1977, the Grand Forks Herald’s Ann Bailey reported, and Pinke would stop at nothing to ensure he did the same.

The first of two life-changing events occurred June 23, 2015. Pinke, the second-ranked high school basketball player in North Dakota at the time, was weeks away from realizing his dream of playing with UND. As he was scrolling through Twitter, he saw a Tweet that said “R.I.P Zach. You will be missed.” Pinke would soon learn that best friend, Zach Kvalvog, was killed in a car accident along with Kvalvog’s brother.

“I didn’t touch a basketball for the next three months,” Pinke said. “I think my dream might have died along with Zach that day.”

A week later, he received the call he had been dreaming of his whole life. It was the University of North Dakota, but not the basketball team. Head football coach Bubba Schweigert was on the other end, offering Pinke a scholarship to play tight end for his dream school.

He leapt at the chance, describing it as “the best five years of my life.”

Pinke’s life was transformed once more 566 days ago. He took a trip to Keystone, Colorado for a skiing trip with a handful of friends in December of 2019. An avid and experienced skier, Pinke loved to ski between the trees. On December 27, he took a route that followed a carved-out chute in a wooded area, and another skier collided with him, sending Pinke headfirst into a tree.

“My helmet saved my life, I wouldn’t be here if I wasn’t wearing my helmet,” he said. “The pressure from the injury went through the top of my head, through my neck, and shattered my T4 through T9 of my spine.”

The nature of his injury left him paralyzed from the chest down. He was given a two percent chance of regaining any bit of feeling in the lower half of his body, and spent nine days in St. Anthony’s hospital recovering from surgery before being transferred to Craig Hospital in Englewood, Colorado for two and a half months of inpatient and outpatient care.

“One question that I always get asked though is ‘Hunter if you could go back to the day when it happened, would you change it?'” he said. “My answer a lot of times surprises them. No I wouldn’t. I wouldn’t be talking to you. Maybe, just maybe, one person in here needs to hear what I have to say. Who am I to mess with God’s plan?”

Pinke, now studying online at the University of Arizona in the school’s master of architecture program while training for the school’s adaptive track and field team, began traveling throughout North Dakota, South Dakota and Minnesota last summer to share his story.

“The feedback on my story, and ever since I really got injured, I feel like this state and people in our region have really gravitated toward it,” he said. “Especially going through COVID, I think it was a story of hope.”

Everywhere he goes, his goal to help at least one person remains the same, and his message is unchanging: there are no bad days, only tough days. Right around the corner from tough days, he says, there is a good day coming.

“It’s really gratifying to see the impact that my story can have on somebody who might be struggling with something not exactly the same as me,” he added. “But I always say everybody’s got struggle. Pain is pain. Struggle is struggle. You don’t struggle with what I struggle with, but I don’t struggle with what you struggle with either. If I can help people, give them some hope, inspire them to make a change, and go after something and chase after their dreams, why wouldn’t I take that opportunity?”