North Goes From Health Scare To Guiding Up-And-Coming Eagles

This fall, Ashland University Director of Golf Operations/men's golf head coach Dennis North is leading a young Eagle team which is making a lot of strides in the fall non-championship season.
 
Last fall, North was a couple days away from dying – all because of scratching the back of his head.
 
"It was kind of mid-summer that I dealt with a very itchy head," said North, now in his seventh year at Ashland. "I had scratched my head so hard, that I felt like a little open wound on the back of my head."
 
After being told it was like a cyst or a boil, there also was a bump on the back of his head, but it went away.
 
"Then like a couple weeks later, I'm scratching my head again, and I feel that open wound again. Now I get another bump. So now, we just assume that it's this boil, this cyst. We waited for the open wound to dry, and once it dried, I had some stiffness in my neck, which obviously none of us knew at the time that that was actually MRSA that was in there, when I created that open wound."
 
North said the wound was scraped, and then he was put on an antibiotic. But that wasn't the end.
 
"You could already see the back of my head was really pink, full of infection of which we didn't really know at the time that was what it was. The next morning, I had sent a picture to my brother-in-law, Dr. (John) Peck, who is a urologist here in town. He's like, 'Call me now.'"
 
Peck told him to go to the emergency room. "I was in a hospital bed within an hour," North recalled.
 
It was a good thing North took Peck's advice – North said that the MRSA was contained in the back of his neck, but if it was 48 hours later and it hadn't been diagnosed, he probably would have passed away.
 
"I was in there for a week. I had three surgeries while I was in there," he said. "They sent me home with a wound vac. I had to carry the wound vac. They took it off, and then we scheduled the fourth surgery to close up the wound as much as they could.
 
"From there, your body kind of heals itself."
 
Coming off a 2023 Great Midwest Athletic Conference championship – the program's first conference title in 57 years – and an NCAA Division II tournament spot, North, the 2022-23 Great Midwest Coach of the Year, was looking forward to seeing what the 2023-24 Eagles could do. He missed three fall tournaments, however.
 
"We were so excited," North said. "You're basically bringing the same team back. There's high expectations. High expectations are amazing. I was so excited to go back to them."
 
The 2024 Great Midwest Championships, however, ended with the Eagles finishing literally in the middle of the pack in seventh place in the 13-team field.
 
"You're going to have high expectations, but it's never perfect, and all you can do is keep fighting," North said. "It surely didn't end the way we wanted…through all this adversity, all those guys worked very hard. There's wonderful life lessons for all of us. When things don't go your way, you keep fighting and fighting and fighting. That's all you can do."
 
Fast forward to this fall. The 14-player roster has two seniors, four juniors, no sophomores and eight freshmen.
 
What have been the results? Going from sixth place as a team to start the fall, to fourth, then third, then second in the 19-team Doc Spragg Fall Invitational at Findlay. And some of the team and individual scores have been among the best since as long as records are available (since 1996-97).
 
"It's exciting," North said. "The last couple years, these guys kind of coached themselves. I was pretty hands-off with those guys, because that top five was pretty cemented.
 
"Now, we're excited because there's new energy, there's new things to teach eight freshmen who are coming in. We kind of talked at the beginning…we're young, we're going to have ups and downs, and your goal is to win the day."
 
North's message about health moving forward is a simple one – don't go picking at the back of your head.
 
"All of us men are stubborn," he said. "Make sure you're doing all that stuff that they recommend that we do, and I definitely would tell you not to pick at the back of your head."