Week 11 Kid Captain Tate Manahl is an avid baseball and flag football player. The 8-year-old enjoys running around and playing with his friends. And his parents are grateful that he still has an opportunity to play sports after an accident he went through at 3 years old.

Ryan Manahl, Tate’s father, was using a riding lawn mower to cut grass at their family home in Cedar Falls, Iowa, when Tate returned from running errands with his mother, Fonda. After getting out of the car, Tate ran up behind the lawn mower to see his father. Without seeing Tate, Ryan put the mower in reverse.

“It was August 30th of 2017, and Tate arrived home without my knowledge and wanted to see Dad,” Ryan said. “He came up behind me without my knowledge, and I didn’t see him, and he unfortunately ended up under the lawnmower. Half of his body was under it, and he suffered life-threatening injuries from that accident.”

After the accident, Tate was airlifted to the University of Iowa Stead Family Children’s Hospital. Fonda said the helicopter touched down in the backyard her family shares with its neighbors.

Fonda and Ryan couldn’t be with Tate during the 30-minute helicopter trip to Iowa City. Rather, they had to drive an hour and 20 minutes to UIHC.

“We didn’t know going to Iowa City if he was going to make it or not,” Fonda said. “It was just that bad, injury-wise. We had to kind of, like, prepare ourselves. Obviously, a lot of prayers were being said, and we had to hope that everything would be OK.”

Even after the Manahls arrived at UIHC, however, they didn’t find relief. Tate had a seven-hour emergency surgery after he arrived at the hospital. Then, he had to have a couple more surgeries to fully repair his intestines.

It took about a week for Tate to have functioning intestines again, Ryan said.

“It was a relief to get down there, but we weren’t really relieved until they repaired his intestines, and then we found out they were actually working,” Ryan said. “To know that they were working, he had to have a bowel movement, so we were cheering for your kid to go No. 2.”

But Tate wasn’t out of the woods yet. He stayed in the hospital for 43 days as doctors performed multiple surgeries to save his legs. Ryan said doctors put in muscle flaps and skin grafts and moved some bone from a different part of his body to the leg.

It took Tate two years to recover from his injuries. After he was released from the hospital, he wore an external fixator — rods that are screwed into his bone and attached outside his body to a stabilizer — to help grow three inches of bone marrow. The Manahls did at-home therapy and physical therapy at Mercy One Hospital in Waterloo, along with trips to UIHC for additional surgeries on his legs.

“We were amazed that they were able to save both of his legs,” Fonda said. “There was a lot of time spent at home with his external fixator trying to fix his bone, and many surgeries with that, but it’s amazing what the doctors can do.”

Now, Tate is nearly back to full strength with almost zero limitations participating in sports. Ryan said Tate did develop a drop foot — a condition that makes it difficult to lift the front part of the foot — in his right foot. He wears an ankle foot orthosis brace during the night a couple times a week to help combat the condition, but it doesn’t affect how he runs.

“Someone who didn’t know who Tate was and the backstory, they’d never know he went through 30-plus surgeries and everything he has done,” Ryan said. “So, it’s pretty amazing just what the doctors and staff can do to reassemble his little body.”

Ryan and Fonda nominated Tate to be a Kid Captain for the 2022 season. Tate’s orthopedic surgeon, Michael Willey, also wrote a letter of recommendation, Ryan said. The Manahl family asked Willey to join them on the field on Saturday to represent how grateful they are for all of Tate’s doctors.

Fonda said Willey originally rejected so he didn’t take away from other doctors who also worked with Tate, but the family eventually convinced him to accept.

“We asked him to come out on the field with Tate, just because of how much he and all of the other doctors mean to us to give us the opportunity to continue [Tate’s] life,” Ryan said. “Every day, it just means so much to us. I know it’s for the kids, but we just want him on the field to enjoy that experience with us.”