Former Dematha Catholic High School football star Tim Strachan, who was tragically paralyzed in a 1993 swimming accident, has died at 49. Strachan passed away Tuesday after a yearlong battle with cancer.

He is being remembered as a man who served as an inspiration to many as he went on to become a father, a football coach, a broadcaster and an attorney with the FCC.

There are many ways to describe Strachan. Here’s how the man who coached him at Dematha does it:

“Timmy is Timmy. He is going to live forever in the memory of all of us here at Dematha,” head football coach Bill McGregor said. “Football was one thing, but what Timmy taught us so much about is life. He faced an awful lot of adversity from a very early age. Never once did I hear him complain or say, ‘Woe is me,’ or ‘Why did it happen to me?’ or anything like that.”

In the summer of 1993, about to start his senior year, Strachan dove into the water at Bethany Beach and was paralyzed from the neck down. His football career, which had looked so promising, was over.

Instead, Strachan would have to reimagine what his life would look like going forward.

He was just 17.

“Timmy had offers before his senior year, and that’s highly, highly unusual back then, and he could have gone anywhere he wanted,” McGregor said.

But Strachan took a new path. He went on to earn a law degree from Georgetown University and became a motivational speaker.

At Dematha’s commencement in 2014, he told new graduates and their families: “If you master the fundamentals of your sport, you’re eventually going to become successful, and the same goes for life.”

Strachan never let his disability get in the way of what he wanted to accomplish. He became a father to three — two girls and a boy — and spent 22 years working with Johnny Holliday as an analyst on Maryland football broadcasts.

Holliday recalls saying to him before their first broadcast together, “‘You had a full ride to Penn State to play for Joe Paterno. You know more football than I will ever know. Anything I ask you, you’re going to be able to answer.’ And after the first day … it was like he had been doing it forever.”

Remembering Tim Strachan

Holliday went to see Strachan in the hospital recently.

The news of Strachan death hit him hard. His voice broke as Holliday spoke about his friend and colleague.

“I wish everybody could have met him and spent time with him, because he would have had the same effect on them that he had on me and everybody else he ran into,” he said.

Strachan will be remembered with a funeral mass July 22 in Kensington, Maryland, where he lived with his family.

Tom Ponton, the director of advancement at Dematha, says Strachan was reflective when he spoke to him recently: “He said, ‘Tom, I have never questioned God to why I have been dealt a few bad hands, but I have questioned God as to why I have had so many wonderful people in my life.'”