Scoring in a game, Lesley basketball player with one arm celebrated for making history

“I never really saw anybody on TV playing games that looked like me,” she said. “I didn’t know if a coach or a team would really take me seriously.”

Now, after years of hard work landed her a spot on the roster at Cambridge’s Lesley University, she appears to have made NCAA history. In December, she became what her Division 3 teammates believe is the first one-armed player to score in a women’s college basketball game. Then, she did it again.

The journey for Sinaman-Daniel began with a setback. In high school, she had worked her way from the junior varsity to varsity team but was cut from the team her senior year. She was devastated but motivated to show her coach she had more potential than he realized.

“I was sitting in my car one day and I told myself, I need to prove this man wrong,” she said.

She emailed a highlight reel of her best high school plays to every college basketball program she could find, hoping someone would take a chance on her. One, a small liberal arts college in western North Carolina, did. There, she shined as a particularly ferocious defense player.

“She got in there. She was aggressive. She played just like everybody else did,” said Warren Wilson College coach Robin Martin-Davis. “She’s not one to give up and say, nobody’s done this before, so you can’t do this.”

There isn’t much of a playbook for basketball players with one arm, especially at the college level. Still, fans of the sport have recently been enamored with Hansel Enmanuel, a guard for the Austin Peay Governors who competes with just the use of his right arm, and became a sensation in men’s college basketball just as Sinaman-Daniel herself was pursuing college ball.

Sinaman-Daniel said she has studied YouTube videos of Enmanuel’s spectacular maneuvers — he crosses up two-armed opponents, pulls down rebounds, and even dunks — to mimic his technique.

“He was doing so many moves that I didn’t think were possible,” she said. “Day in and day out, I would just watch him and take notes.”

She and her coaches over the years learned through trial-and-error how to maximize her playing ability. One innovation: To soften the blow to her sternum from hard passes, which can knock the wind out of her, she wears a chest plate in an athletic compression shirt.

After two seasons at Warren Wilson, feeling isolated in the mountains, Sinaman-Daniel began dreaming of playing for a team in a city. So in 2023 she put herself in the NCAA’s transfer portal, where coaches scout for players.

That’s where she caught the eye of Lesley women’s basketball coach Martin Rather, who had been brought on that year to invigorate a team that had been in a many years-long slump.

As he built the roster, he wasn’t necessarily after the most naturally gifted players, he said. He wanted people with heart.

“You may not always be the tallest player. You may not always be the strongest player. But there is nothing stopping anyone on our team from being the hardest-working player and the smartest player,” Rather said. “If they’ve got the right work ethic, that’s something we can work with. Baileigh is a tremendous success story for that.”

Before she came to Cambridge, her story attracted national attention, and she was featured in segments in outlets including “Good Morning America” and “The Jennifer Hudson Show.”

The exposure helped her connect with some younger one-handed basketball players, with whom she stays in touch on Instagram.

Bigger picture, she hopes people with disabilities who hear about her are inspired to try big things, on the court or off.

“It doesn’t even have to be sports. It could be cooking. It could be computer science,” she said. “I’m just hoping that somebody watches me and thinks to themselves, ‘OK. I could probably do that, too.’”

It hasn’t always been easy to follow her own advice, she admits.

In the heat of a game, she can underestimate herself, a lingering side effect of bullying in her high school years, when classmates said she’d only been let on her basketball team because the coach pitied her.

She can be reluctant to take too many shots, more apt to pass to teammates than risk missing.

“My biggest fear was if I did shoot the ball, it was not going to go in, and then I’d just look like this, you know, one-armed player who got brought here because somebody felt bad,” she said. “I was so afraid of proving everybody right.”

She has tried to suppress the thought that has crept up on her since she was a teen: If I’d had both arms, would I have caught that pass? Would that shot have gone in?

“I’m like, ‘I can be good with just one. I don’t need two!’”

A chance to prove herself as a scorer came in a Dec. 4 game against Fitchburg State, when a teammate passed her the ball on the left side of the court, just inside of the three-point line. Wide open. Swish.

She didn’t think too much of it in the moment, instinctively running back on defense, but Rather, her coach, called a timeout to celebrate. That’s when it really sunk in, she said.

“I feel like it was a moment for all of us,” she said. “It paid off, everything that we’ve been working so hard to do.”

Lesley believes this is a first. A spokesperson for the National Collegiate Athletics Association, Massillon Myers, said he couldn’t confirm that milestone, as the organization‘s research team doesn’t track athletes’ disabilities. A historian contacted by the Globe, Richard Johnson, of the Sports Museum, said he wasn’t aware of any other one-armed athletes who had competed at the college level.

Sinaman-Daniel has scored before, sinking three free throws for Warren Wilson. This was her first basket in live play.

It wasn’t her last. On Tuesday, she also scored during a 50-36 win against Fisher College, a game in which she logged a career high in minutes.

For the rest of the season, she’s setting the bar higher. She wants to shoot more. She wants to get four points in a game, or six. Then more. Maybe a whole lot more.

“I’ve always wanted to get a double-double,” she said, referring to the term in basketball for when a player in one game notches two double-digit statistics in points, rebounds, assists, steals, or blocked shots. “We’re getting there. Just nine more rebounds. Eight more points,” she said. ”I’ll make it.”

Spencer Buell can be reached at spencer.buell@globe.com. Follow him @SpencerBuell.