600 Days: Plitzuweit’s Push to Play Again

The first portion of A.J. Plitzuweit’s return as a South Dakota men’s basketball player is over. He’s back on the roster and is practicing with the team. The comeback trail winds on, however.

Where will it end? That’s a question Plitzuweit gets often these days. The most honest answer is that there is no end. Coming back from such a serious knee injury doesn’t come with a finish line. It comes with today and then tomorrow and then the day after. 

“With an injury like I had, I don’t think the rehab ever really stops,” he said. “I just want to make sure my leg is strong enough and I’m doing all the right things to stretch and make sure my body feels good enough that I can go out and play basketball on a nightly basis.”

Things went sideways for the son of former USD women’s coach Dawn Plitzuweit on Feb. 27, 2021. Late in a game in which he’d scored 20 points, he went down with an injury that immediately quieted the Coyote crowd and sent athletic trainers hurrying to Plitzuweit’s aid. It was all sort of a blur, he said. Those who witnessed it in person or saw it live on television will remember it clearly, however. It was the kind of injury you don’t replay for a TV audience.

“It all happened so fast,” Plitzuweit said. “I was at the hospital in Sioux Falls within an hour of getting hurt. It happened so fast I really don’t look back and think about it too often.”

Head coach Eric Peterson, a former USD assistant who was on Craig Smith’s staff at Utah State at the time, was watching the game on his phone while on a road trip. 

“It was a huge game – USD was contending for a conference championship,” Peterson said. “There were a lot of guys on that team that we’d recruited when we were there. I saw what happened. I texted Dawn after that and wished them the best.”

The Coyotes would go on to defeat North Dakota State that day and go on to win a first-round Summit League tournament game before losing to NDSU in the semifinals.

It’s been more than a year and a half since then and Plitzuweit, with present and former teammates moving on with their eligibility or now establishing careers outside the game, is still preparing to play in his first game since the injury. 

The time away has been filled with small wins, small defeats and a resolve not only to follow rehab instructions to the letter, but also to greet the intermittent discouragements with long-term targets still in focus. Recovery from a knee injury like this is not a steady climb. 

“I knew there were going to be good days and bad days,’ Plitzuweit said. “And on those bad days sometimes it was easy to let your mind go to a place where you don’t know if you’re going to be good enough, or if you’re ever going to be able to do what you want to do. But I have a real good support system that helped me stay optimistic and kept me pushing forward when things got difficult.”

Plitzuweit graduated as South Dakota’s Mr. Basketball in 2018, averaging 33.9 points a game as a senior at Vermillion High School. He went on to Augustana where, as a true freshman, he averaged 14.6 points for the Vikings and was named the Northern Sun Conference’s freshman of the year.

It was a strong enough season to encourage him to pursue Division I. Given that the town where he went to high school also had a Division I program – and his mom was the very successful coach of the women’s college basketball team in that town – USD was the obvious choice.

After watching from the sidelines for a season due to NCAA transfer rules at the time, Plitzuweit entered the 2020-21 campaign ready to go for former USD coach Todd Lee. Anyone with any doubts about the kid’s capacity to be a factor at the Division I level had to learn to be quiet. Early on it was obvious that he was one of the league’s best players, combining elite skills handling the basketball with excellent instincts and long-range shooting accuracy. 

He was averaging 18.9 points, 3.9 assists and 4.1 rebounds a game when the knee injury ended his season. He was first-team all-Summit League and named Newcomer of the Year in spite of finishing up on the sidelines.

The painful progress made since then has been a battle fought in front of teammates, coaches and, especially, an athletic training staff at USD that he credits with doing great things to bring about his recovery.

“Getting back to play is something I’ve thought about for almost two years now,” Plitzuweit said. “I’ve been doing the math – I’m over 600 days now without playing in a basketball game. It’s something that I’ve looked forward to and I can’t wait for.”

In this instance, absence had definitely made the heart grow fonder. The longer he was away the more he appreciated the sport of basketball and all it meant to him. 

For Peterson, seeing Plitzuweit’s sense of joy up close has been a bonus. The new coach has had a lot to sort out personnel-wise since taking over the Coyote program. One of those projects has been monitoring the progress of his former Summit League first-team guard with three years of eligibility remaining. 

“I’m not saying he ever took the game for granted but he loves going to practice because he couldn’t do it for so long,” Peterson said. “We have a lot of young guys on this team and I think his willingness to come to practice every day with passion and energy has had a great influence on them. The message is basically this: ‘I didn’t get to play for a year and a half. That’s a tough thing. Let’s not waste our practices. Let’s not waste opportunities to get better.’”

It’s difficult for Peterson to put a percentage on where Plituzweit is in his recovery because he didn’t coach him before this season. One pleasant surprise, however, has been the quality of defense the coach has seen. It would be easy for a shooter to make that part of the game a lower priority than everything else, but Plitzuweit is a coach’s kid and wants to be a coach himself. A lot of times those types don’t take the easiest route to the starting lineup.

“He’s one of the best perimeter defenders on our team,” Peterson said. “I can tell he’s really worked on it and taken it seriously. Overall, it’s another indication of what a great leader he is. Sometimes when you’ve been out for a while you don’t really feel like one of the guys when you get back out there. I expected he was going to have a good understanding of the game given his background and his family, but he’s been an unbelievable leader already.”

Though he wasn’t born in Vermillion, Plitzuweit is essentially a hometown kid whose local legacy is secure at this point. That’s how it works when you average 33.9 points a game your senior year of high school. This notoriety inevitably leads to questions, of course.

He’s given out a lot of progress reports over those 600 days and he’s cool with that.

“It goes ‘How’s your knee? How are you doing? When are you going to be back out there?’” Plitzuweit said. “At times it can seem a little repetitive  but it’s been good because it shows you how much this community cares and how much they want to see the team do well and how much they want to see me do well personally. I’m very appreciative of that.”