Resilient athlete overcomes adversity with prosthetic, to throw first pitch at Big Sticks game
Jun. 2—DICKINSON — A Southwest North Dakota charitable organization has been helping area youths since roughly 2018, and one of their beneficiaries will be on hand at the Badlands Big Sticks home game on Saturday versus the Sawtooth (Idaho) Sockeyes at Astoria Field.
The young woman is an athlete named Taylor Grill, who is from New Underwood, SD — by way of Edgemont, SD — and a current student at South Dakota State University and she lost her arm in an automobile accident in early 2020. In the collision, Taylor was left with a broken left femur and right tibia and fibula and her left humerus in her arm was damaged past the point of reconstruction and the resultant amputation required extensive physical therapy. Her younger brother, Cade, also was in the accident, but he sustained only minor injuries in the crash. The accident also rendered her unable to rope and ride, two activities she grew up with through her passion for rodeo.
But the new prosthetic has increased the range of activities she can perform and improved the quality of her life to the point that she is able to use the device to help guide the horse while the roping skills she developed in her youth take over from there. She also is a standout volleyball player and continued in the game after she recovered from her injuries and returned to the court during high school.
"My whole family rodeos — my parents, my brothers — so I mostly use my arm for roping and riding, which I'm really big into, and doing some training," Taylor said. "Someone reached out to my Mom and kind of mentioned that there is a foundation that did a lot of that stuff for people with similar circumstances to me and so somebody sent the information along to my Mom and they reached out to her."
That organization is known as the Little Buddies Foundation, and it is run by Killdeer High School head basketball coach Greg Pruitt. Each year, Coach Pruitt and the organization choose a recipient or recipients for donations to help them recover from their injuries, particularly by offering prosthetics to those who suffer catastrophic injuries. The idea came from a mentor of Pruitt's, the legendary basketball coach Don Meyer, who had been in an accident in 2008 that required the amputation of his lower-left leg. The resultant device, which Meyer referred to as his "little buddy," provided him a range of mobility and served as impetus for Pruitt's foundation.
"Coach Meyer played a major role in my life as a head coach and he taught me a lot about the game of basketball," Pruitt said. "But he taught me more about life, and when he passed away I wanted to honor him."
Taylor will be throwing out the first pitch before the 6:20 p.m. game at Dakota Community Bank & Trust Ballpark. Tickets are available online at
or at the gate.
For more information about the Little Buddies Foundation or to learn about ways to contribute to the organization, please visit the website at
The Dickinson Press will have a full feature about Taylor in the Monday edition of the newspaper, along with full coverage of the first-pitch at the game and more information about the Little Buddies Foundation run by Coach Pruitt.
