His is a story of inspiration, humility, sportsmanship and mental toughness.
All of those attributes together resulted in a Class AA individual state golf championship for O’Gorman’s Drew Simon, who won the title in a sudden death playoff last week at Lee Park Golf Course in Aberdeen.
The intriguing, and inspirational, thing about this story isn’t so much that he won in a pressure-packed playoff that would make most golfers queasy under the gravity of the situation, it’s how he got there.
Best performance of the year
It’s not like Simon entered this year’s tournament as a massive underdog. The senior finished 10th in the state meet two years ago.
- But even he admits he didn’t have his greatest golf season in 2026. His best outing was a 76 midway through O’Gorman’s regular season.
Last week in Aberdeen, though, the 18-year old strung together a pair of one-under-par scores on back-to-back days before drilling a four-foot put in sudden death over Lincoln’s Tyson Blom.
“I really didn’t feel much at all,” he said when asked if he felt the nerves creeping in during the playoff. “When I’m on a golf course, I don’t really have expectations. You just gotta keep going.”
‘It was the right thing to do’
After finishing 10th in the state meet as a sophomore in 2024, Simon was obviously looking forward to another shot in 2025 as a junior…