COLLEGE DIVISION / MITCH POLIN : La Verne’s Ortmayer, 73, Giving Up His Spot on Sideline After 45 Seasons

It will mark the end of an era when La Verne’s football team plays host to Claremont-Mudd-Scripps Saturday.

After 45 years as a college coach, two at William Penn of Iowa and the past 43 at La Verne, Roland Ortmayer is calling it a career.

Only to Ortmayer, 73, it will simply be another in a series of steps in his life.

“The way I look at it, this is just another part of my life that I’m going to go through,” Ortmayer said. “I spent a big chunk of my life, 45 years, as a college coach, and I look at this as just another step.”

Before Saturday’s game, Ortmayer will enter the field through a tunnel of fans, and he and his wife of 47 years, Cornelia, will be honored at halftime. Ortmayer will also be present after the game when ground is broken for La Verne’s new football and track facility, to be called Ortmayer Sports Complex.

But if it were up to Ortmayer, who will remain as athletic director, track coach and teacher at the university through next May, he would rather people didn’t get too carried away with his impending departure.

Said Ortmayer: “They ran an article (on me) in Sports Illustrated last year, and the last line says, ‘Some day in May, I’ll just walk away.’ Well, that really was my plan. I wanted to just walk away and say that was my last year. But in order to provide a good transition for everyone, I decided this would be the way to do it.”

Ortmayer enters the game with a 184-191-6 record, but is three games above .500 at La Verne. From his perspective, though, winning and losing are not all that important.

“If you love sports, that’s the way it should be,” he said. “The winner can’t win unless there is a loser to lose. A game in sport always ends at .500.”

As a coach, Ortmayer doesn’t have a lot of requirements for his team. He doesn’t use a playbook and doesn’t punish players for missing practice.

“On our team, you are not punished,” he said. “You don’t run laps and you don’t do push-ups as punishment. You may run a lot or do exercises of resistance as a part of your normal work but not as punishment.”

He also frowns on players wearing their jerseys anywhere but on the football field. “I don’t want to see any of my players wearing a jersey on campus or in their car or in the classroom,” he said. “The only place I want to see a football jersey is on the field.”

Ortmayer says that sports should only be one ingredient in the recipe for a well-rounded education. “I want sport to be a part of America’s educational system,” he said. “I want it to be just as important as the history we teach or the science we teach. But I don’t want it to be any more important.”

Ortmayer has left his mark on players he has coached over the years.

One is Azusa Pacific Coach Jim Milhon, who played for Ortmayer from 1956 through ’58 and has coached against him 13 times.

“I don’t coach like him, but there are pieces of Ort that hang around inside of me,” Milhon said. “There are other people who helped me grow as a coach, but he’s the one who sparked me.

“I think . . . that down through the years, people get the feeling that because he’s so low-key, his teams are not prepared, and that’s not true. They also think that he’s not organized, and that’s not true. And they think that he doesn’t care about winning, and that’s not true. He wants to win just as much as anyone else and maybe more.”

While eager to spend more time at his hobbies, such as rafting and fly-fishing, Ortmayer admitted that he will probably miss being close to the students.

And the feeling will be mutual.

“He’ll be missed, but in the community of La Verne, the stories about him will go on forever,” Milhon said.

Cal State Northridge and Azusa Pacific entered last week’s football games with hopes of reaching the divisional playoffs for the first time, but each was beaten.

CS Northridge lost to Cal Poly San Luis Obispo, 6-3, and Azusa Pacific was beaten, 27-23, by UC Santa Barbara.

Despite the setback, CS Northridge tied Cal Poly SLO for the Western Football Conference title at 4-1. But the Matadors (7-1) will probably need to upset Cal State Long Beach, an NCAA Division I team, this Saturday to reach the Division II playoffs.

With its victory, Cal Poly SLO advanced to No. 8 in the Division II poll. CS Northridge dropped to No. 13 in the rankings.

Azusa Pacific (6-2) may have seen its National Assn. of Intercollegiate Athletics Assn. playoff hopes disappear in its loss to UC Santa Barbara.

Redlands wrapped up its first Southern California Intercollegiate Athletic Conference football championship since 1980 with a 52-14 victory over defending champion Occidental.

The Bulldogs (7-1), who play host to winless Whittier Saturday night, are ranked No. 5 in the Division III West Region, but must finish among the top four to make the playoffs.

College Division Notes

Pomona-Pitzer will play host to the NCAA Division III West Regional in women’s volleyball today through Saturday. The SCIAC champion Sagehens (23-3, 10-0) are seeded No. 2 in the tournament behind UC San Diego. Other teams in the regional are La Verne, North Carolina Greensboro, Colorado College and Cal State San Bernardino.

Junior midfielder Justin Wall, who helped lead Westmont College to the Golden State Athletic Conference title in men’s soccer, was named the conference player of the year. Westmont also placed forward Rob Ring, midfielder Aerick Brown and defender Cees Molenaar on the all-conference first team. . . . The CS San Bernardino men’s soccer team saw its season end with a 1-0 overtime loss to UC San Diego in the first round of the Division III playoffs. CS San Bernardino, playing in its final season in Division III before moving up to Division II in 1991, will have 20 of 23 players back next season.

Behind strong performances by Stephane Franke and Jaime Ortega, sixth-ranked Cal Poly Pomona surprised No. 3 Cal Poly SLO and No. 4 Humboldt State to win the men’s cross-country title in the NCAA Division II West Regional Saturday at UC Riverside. Franke finished in first place, Ortega in third to carry the Broncos to a 13-point advantage over runner-up Humboldt, with Cal Poly SLO a distant third. . . . Cal Poly SLO, eight-time defending national champion, placed three runners in the top 10 of the women’s cross-country division of the NCAA Division II Regional Saturday at Riverside and won the meet by 16 points over UC Davis.