Freshman makes mark on golf team
Standing well over 6 feet tall with a stocky build, Brendon Ehlers doesn’t look like a golfer.
“Everyone says I should be playing football because of my size,” Ehlers said. “I get that a lot.”
But the freshman from Evanston, Wyo., has made an immediate impact on the USU golf team.
“I’m having a lot of fun,” he said. “It’s been a great experience playing college golf. It’s a dream come true.”
Ehlers said he picked up golf from his dad, who is a golf pro in Evanston, who had Brendan swinging golf clubs by the time he was 3 years old.
“I’ve been playing ever since,” he said. “I’ve been around golf my whole life.
My goal in life was to see how far I can go in this sport.”
Head coach Dean Johansen said Ehlers does not play like a freshman.
“He thinks like a senior on the golf course,” he said. “He thinks his way through better than any freshman I’ve had.”
Ehlers said he is good friends with another notable freshman from Evanston, basketball star Jaycee Carroll.
“We were on the same basketball team and the golf team in high school,” he said. “He was a senior when I was a sophomore. His dad was my coach. We were neighbors and really good family friends. I see him all the time.”
Johansen said he thinks his experience on the court has helped Ehlers on the course.
“With his background in basketball, he’s got a lot of mental toughness,” he said. “He’s won a state championship in basketball and in golf. So he’s very well prepared mentally.
“I think that’s what’s setting him apart from the rest of the freshman ‘I’ve had in the last few years.”
Ehlers also finished sixth in the 2004 Wyoming State Golf Association Men’s Amateur Championship.
Johansen said Ehlers started a little slow this season, but has picked it up considerably since then.
“He was a little nervous towards the first of the year and did”t perform as well as we were expecting,” he said. “Once we put him in the rotation with the other four guys who are travelling and are a little bit more experienced, he’s come along and made leaps and bounds in his performance on the road and his routine here in practice.”
While Ehlers acknowledged that Carroll gets much more attention, he does not mind staying in that background of the sports arena in Cache Valley.
“A lot of people don’t even know we have a golf program, which is fine,” he said. “It’s not real big here. I’ve been getting that all my life.”
But there is something that bothers him. He said he doesn’t like to hear it when people tell him that not as much is expected of him because he is a freshman.
“I don’t like to go along with that,” he said. “Golf is golf.”
-bhhinton@cc.usu.edu