COACH DINOSAUR, PLEASE!

 The situation:

There are moments in American life when a single figure—eccentric, stubborn, unpolished—stands as a quiet rebuke to the systems that claim inevitability. College athletics, with its relentless metrics and monetized spectacle, rarely produces such figures anymore. But every so often, a life appears that exposes the poverty of our assumptions simply by refusing to play along.

Roland “Ort” Ortmayer was one of those lives.

To encounter Ort is to feel the ground shift under your feet. He coached football as if the point were not domination but discovery. He treated young men not as assets to be optimized but as souls to be tended. He built a program that looked, from the outside, like an anachronism—too slow, too relational, too humane to survive in the modern era. And yet, for more than half a century, he endured. More than that: he formed people.

His endurance is even more striking when set against the long arc of American college sports. The system Ort inhabited—and quietly resisted—was not always the behemoth it is today. Early reformers, shaped by the ideals of muscular Christianity, believed athletics could cultivate virtue, discipline, and service. The founders of the Big Ten insisted that sport remain subordinate to the academic mission; they feared precisely the professionalization that now defines the landscape. By the mid‑20th century, critics like Robert Hutchins at the University of Chicago warned that big‑time football was incompatible with the university’s intellectual vocation. Chicago ultimately dropped its program rather than surrender its identity. That decision now feels almost mythic, a relic from a time when universities still believed they could say no.

Modern college sports have long since abandoned that restraint. Television contracts dictate kickoff times. Conference realignment follows media markets rather than geography or tradition. Coaches sign contracts that rival corporate executives, while the athletes whose bodies generate the wealth navigate pressures—academic, physical, psychological—that the system is structurally incapable of honoring. Even reforms meant to correct the imbalance—NIL, the transfer portal, expanded playoffs—often deepen the underlying problem. They treat symptoms while leaving the disease untouched: the belief that the purpose of college athletics is to feed an entertainment machine rather than to cultivate human beings.

The deepest problem, however, is not economic or historical. It is theological.

Modern college sports operate on an anthropology fundamentally at odds with the Christian vision of the human person. The system assumes that young athletes are instruments—means to institutional prestige, revenue, and alumni satisfaction. It rewards coaches who treat players as assets to be optimized, and it punishes those who insist on seeing them as image‑bearers with moral agency. Augustine would diagnose the system as a case of disordered love: an institution that loves victory more than virtue, revenue more than responsibility, spectacle more than students. Niebuhr would expose its self‑deception: a structure that cloaks its ambitions in the language of character formation while pursuing power with unexamined zeal.

Ort’s life disrupts that narrative of inevitability. He embodied an older, nearly forgotten theological anthropology. He coached as if every player were a soul entrusted to his care. He believed that sport could be a school of humility, joy, and self‑knowledge. His program was not a refuge from competition but a re‑imagining of its purpose. In an era increasingly defined by scale, speed, and spectacle, Ort insisted on slowness, presence, and personhood.

His story is not a nostalgic plea for a gentler past. It is a case study in moral imagination. It asks whether the purpose of sport—and by extension, education—might be something other than the pursuit of victory at all costs. It invites us to consider whether a coach can be a kind of teacher, a kind of pastor, even a kind of prophet.

And it raises a harder question still: what does it say about us that a man like Ortmayer now feels impossible?

The man:

Roland “Ort” Ortmayer (1917–2008) lived the kind of life that quietly exposes the poverty of our usual metrics. Born in College Park, Maryland, where his Methodist minister father was awaiting missionary assignment to Europe. Because of World War I, the Ortmayer family was sent insteadto the American West. Ort was raised in the wide, wind‑scoured spaces of Montana, he carried that frontier spaciousness with him for the rest of his days.

He began college at Intermountain Union College (IUC) in Helena, the state capital. IUC was one of those small church-related liberal arts schools formerly ubiquitous throughout the United States. With an enrollment under 200 students, IUC built its reputation on the humanities, debate, and oratory, not athletics. In the era of non-specialization in sports, Ort played halfback for the Panthers on both offense and defense, and probably also played basketball and ran track. At IUC Ort embraced simplicity, resilience, and a non-institutional ethos.

Ort’s education literally shaken by the 1935 earthquake which hit Helena and IUC hard- gym walls collapsed, classroom building severely damaged, and dormitory uninhabitable. He transferred to Northwestern University, where at 147 pounds he somehow found himself projected as a future Big Ten hero. But the real story was never about athletic stardom. It was about formation.

Ort became a teacher first, a coach second, and a humanist always. After early stints in high school classrooms and the principled stand of registering as a conscientious objector in 1940, he settled into the long vocation that would define him: four decades at La Verne College (now university), founded by the Church of the Brethen in 1891, where he coached football with a kind of holy indifference to the industrial logic of the sport. He held non‑mandatory practices, refused to worship at the altar of weight rooms, and insisted that young people deserved something better than being ground down by a system obsessed with winning percentages. His teams floated rivers, camped under Montana skies, and learned that a life well lived is larger than a scoreboard.

By the time he retired in 1990, Ort had accumulated more losses than any coach in college football history—a statistic that, in its own way, testifies to his refusal to bend the knee to the empire of collegiate sports. Yet generations of students and alumni still speak of him as the most influential person in their lives. He built communities, not dynasties, character, not résumés. He taught football, yes—but more than that, he taught how to be human.

Conclusion:

Ort was a throwback to an earlier, simplistic time of college football- a dinosaur if you so desire to label him with that term- a description Ort resisted. But in the new era of college football in which the sport is overflowing with NIL money, in which there is no loyalty to team or school, and in which college coaches are openly calling the sport a NFL minor league, it is a term of affection,

 

[Note; The author of this essay is a former high school soccer and basketball coach, and regularly cheers on his college football team, fully realizing that a large number of college players are still teenagers.]