Excerpt from the Dayton Daily News
By Tom Archdeacon
It began as an assignment for one of his classes at the University of Cincinnati.
“We had to come up with a six-word phrase to use in our life,” Ryan Custer said. “Normally, I’d just have written something pretty quick to get the project done.”
But the more he thought about this challenge, the more it intrigued him and after working through his thoughts, he finally had it:
“What’s done is done. Fight on.”
Along with completing his assignment, he’d found a new maxim for his Twitter page.
“I take that phrase seriously,” he said the other day. “It fits with what has happened in my life.”
A basketball standout at Elder High School in Cincinnati and then a budding college player at Wright State, the 6-foot-7 Custer suffered a traumatic spinal cord injury on April 8, 2017, when he jumped into a makeshift swimming pool at an off-campus party at Miami University, hit someone’s knee and landed wrong, shattering his C-5 vertebra.
Just 33 days after he’d played the final game of his freshman season at WSU, he suddenly was paralyzed from the chest down.
