Basecamp podcast: The inspiration of Kelly Brush

Middlebury skier Kelly Brush severely damaged her spinal cord during a meet in 2006. (Kelly Brush Foundation)

Kelly Brush’s life changed forever on Feb. 18, 2006, when the Middlebury College ski team athlete hit a gate during a meet in Massachusetts. She severely damaged her spinal cord and fractured four ribs and a vertebra in her neck. She would never walk again. 

Despite her new life in a wheelchair, Brush did discover new ways to remain active in adaptive sports, including skiing. The Kelly Brush Foundation is dedicated to making active lifestyles a reality for those who have experienced a spinal cord injury, offering inspiration and the grants to enable anyone to buy the equipment they need to get out and go. 

Founded by the Brush family, the foundation has been committed to ski racing safety and will continue to advocate and provide resources so that every ski racer is training and competing on the safest possible venues. 

Brush was recently a guest on the New England Ski Journal Basecamp podcast, where she discussed her injury, the formation of the foundation, and a new crowdsourcing tool that she hopes creates an easier avenue into the world of adaptive sports.

Highlights from this edition of the Basecamp podcast:

On some of the ways  the foundation seeks to help those in need:

Brush: We help to provide adaptive sports equipment so people can get out and be independent. We help with knowledge, experience, and building community around people with spinal cord injuries. Then the other part of what we do is we promote safety in ski racing. When I got hurt it was an accident that really shouldn’t have happened, there should have been a net that was protecting the lift tower that I hit and there wasn’t. So we knew immediately that we wanted to try to try to change that and change the culture of ski racing. We’ve done a lot of work in that world too.

On how her injury happened at Jiminy Peak:

Brush: It was at the Williams College Carnival at Jiminy Peak in Massachusetts. I was coming off one of my best races the weekend before, and I was really excited to be skiing again. It was a really weird day the day before; it had rained and then it froze overnight. So it was great for racing. It was super solid. It was in the [super G]. I remember skiing the top half of the course really well and thinking I skied it exactly as I needed to.

My last memory was I was going down backwards, thinking that I was going to hit the next gate. That’s actually the last thing that I remember. I don’t remember the impact or being on the snow or anything. I have a couple of snapshot memories of being in the emergency room before surgery, but then my next sort of complete memory is waking up in a hospital bed.

Listen: