BROOKINGS – Between COVID’s meddling tentacles and an injury that threatened to steal the game away from him, Jonah Dohrer’s golf career at South Dakota State has been anything but linear. Or smooth. Or predictable.
But it has made him better.
Dohrer, an Aberdeen native and former Aberdeen Central standout, earned Second Team All-Summit League honors this spring after posting a season scoring average of 73.6 strokes. Dohrer was the lone Jackrabbit named to the all-conference teams.
“It was pretty awesome,” Dohrer said of the honor. “I play golf because I love it, but to get that recognition was pretty awesome.”
The honor was all the more sweet because of the mountainous path his collegiate career traversed.
COVID stole the 2020 season from Dohrer – and the rest of the country, for that matter – but he tried to stay positive through it. Then, just as things started to turn a corner, injury befell him. Hard.
Dohrer tore his Achilles tendon during a friendly family game of pick-up basketball over the Christmas break and, just as suddenly as his 2020 season disappeared, the 2021 season vanished as well.
“It was tough,” Dohrer said of losing yet another season of the game he has loved his entire life. “I just had to learn who I was outside of golf, too. I picked up a job during school. Learned there was a lot more to life outside of golf, and I was able to really appreciate it when I came back. It definitely put things into perspective.”
A torn Achilles is no small recovery, and it was a good four months before Dohrer was walking under his own power again.
“I had to relearn how to walk, and figure out a golf swing from there,” he said.
And if that wasn’t enough, the Jackrabbits got a new coach this season. Had Dohrer walked away from competitive golf, few would have blamed him.
But Dohrer didn’t walk away. In fact, he came back stronger than ever. His career stroke average of 74.9 is the sixth-best in program history. He led the team in scoring in four out of nine tournaments this season and has 12 rounds of par or better, including a round of 67 that is both a career best and a team low for the season.
In short, he’s doing OK.
“We’ve overcome a lot,” Dohrer said of his teammates this season. “We just stuck together. We ended up doing a lot of things together, whether it’s lifting or golf or qualifying. We just had to stick together.”
Dohrer, who graduated with his bachelor’s degree in business economics this spring, will begin a master’s program in economics in the fall while taking his COVID season to play another year of collegiate golf.
Until then, he’ll just keep getting better.
