Hand coach Tredwell inspired by daughter’s perseverance

MADISON — Tim Tredwell will take his Daniel Hand girls basketball team to Winsted on Monday to face No. 1 seed Northwestern Regional.

A win will advance Hand to the CIAC Class MM semifinals. If Northwestern prevails, coach Fred Williams, in his 45th season, will set the state record of 705 career victories.

“I got my first head coaching job at 34,” Tredwell, 47, said. “So that would be another 31 years for me. Am I even going to be alive? I can’t imagine sustaining that level of success for that long. It is so impressive.”

Williams has two daughters who assist him, and it brings him great joy. He said recently he probably would have retired a long time ago if not for them.

Tredwell smiles. He knows the joy of daughters.

Emily, a 14-year-old freshman at Middletown High, was born in New Haven with a congenital femoral deficiency. Her right femur did not develop. It was a shock to Tim and Kate Tredwell.

She had managed to squirm around and only the left leg was measured. At first, it was thought to be hip dysplasia.“A couple of days later, the doctor comes in with a stack of folders,” Tim said. “They tell us what they think it is. Of all the things you’re worried about when your kid is born, that’s not in the top 50.”

They immediately were sent to an orthopedist, who talked them through it, who said he had seen patients like this.

“He said, ‘It’s probably easier to amputate,’” Tredwell said. “Emily’s two days old. She hasn’t even been home yet. Your mind is running wild.”

Amputate at the ankle, they were told, fuse the knee so the tibia-fibula becomes one piece. By the time she is fully grown it will appear like an amputation below the knee and Emily can use a prosthetic leg.

“As parents, we’re deciding for a kid who has no say in it,” Tim said.

Tim, a physical education teacher at John Winthrop Middle School in Deep River, and Kate, a nurse who does home care from Middlesex Hospital, met with specialists. Desperate, they kept hunting.

Word surfaced of Dr. Dror Paley at John Hopkins.

“He was leaving Johns Hopkins for Florida and not taking any new patients,” Tim said. “He told my wife if you can make it down here on a Saturday, he’ll open the place up and we’ll talk.”

Needless to say, they were in the car driving to Baltimore.

Born in Canada, Paley is fluent in six languages. He was trained in Siberia by Gavriil Ilizarov, known for inventing the apparatus to lengthen bones. Paley has developed more than 100 surgical procedures to reconstruct limbs.

“He looks at her X-rays,” Tredwell said. “He looks at her. He moves around. He goes, ‘Yeah, we can fix that.’

“I’ll never forget we were in the lobby afterward getting