College of St. Joseph

By Tom Haley, RUTLAND HERALD STAFF WRITER- Published: April 15, 2009

You never know when a road filled with ruts might turn into a route paved with gold. That was Rich Ortega’s itinerary to professional basketball.

He was a frustrated freshman at Clark University in Worcester, Mass., playing for a different coach than the one who recruited him and promised him significant playing time. Ortega was ignored and rarely got off the bench. He played a grand total of 27 minutes the 2004-05 season.

He recalled coach Jim Graffam, at the time he was the men’s basketball coach at Maine-Fort Kent, had shown great interest in him after watching him play in a showcase in Portland, Maine.

“He came up to me and said, ‘Hey kid, you are the typical Graffam player. You are undersized, but you have a heart like no other and you are not intimidated by anyone. You should really think about playing for me.’”

Graffam went from Maine-Fort Kent to Green Mountain College so Ortega was planning to go to the Poultney campus to play for Graffam.

Then, he heard from Graffam, telling him he was moving across Rutland County to coach at College of St. Joseph. Ortega quickly applied to CSJ and that’s where the coach and player formed a special bond.

“Once I got to CSJ, Coach Graffam said, ‘We finally get together, now let’s do this and drive this ship to the top.’”

And they did. With Graffam coaching and Ortega playing so well that he landed an NAIA National Player of the Week accolade, they won the Sunrise Conference Tournament and made the trip to the national tourney in Missouri for the 2007-08 season.

This season Graffam coached at Lee Academy in Maine and Ortega is playing for Bethlehem Action in the Palestinian Professional League.

Their paths might intersect again. Graffam believes Oretga has a future in coaching and that is a direction Ortega wants to go in when his playing days are through.

“I offered him a job up here when he gets done playing,” Graffam said. “I love his character. He is willing to stand up for what is right.

“We had talks about whether he wanted to go into business — he has a degree in sports management — and make a million dollars or to be poor and spread his life lessons,” Graffam said.

“His situation in Israel is helping his resume for going into coaching”

“I have always thought about being involved with basketball at one level or another. I have had many influences and motivations to coach throughout the years. However, Coach Graffam has been my biggest motivation for coaching,” Ortega said.

Graffam said the traits that would make Ortega a successful coach were unmistakable.

“Usually it is your point guard that talks in the huddle. But Richie (a beefy post player) would says things like ‘we’ve got to get the ball to so-and-so or we need to change defenses.’

“He has always been a thinking man’s guy. He didn’t jump the highest or run the fastest, but he understood angles.

“He would be a natural coach.”

Ortega is a wide body in the basketball vernacular. People would say he didn’t look like a basketball player. One fan walking into the gym just after Ortega collected the NAIA National Player of the Week award, expressed surprise upon his first look at Ortega, as in, “That’s the guy who was national player of the week?”

“All my life as a basketball player, not too many people believed in me because I didn’t look like a basketball player. People always said, ‘You don’t look like a basketball player, you should be playing football.’”

But Ortega scored 1,516 points at CSJ, climbing to fourth on the program’s all-time list despite playing only three seasons. He also hauled down 983 rebounds.

“The best thing he ever did was between his sophomore and junior year when he worked on shooting 3s. That has really helped him at the level he is playing at now,” Graffam said.

During a recent game in Israel, he scored 35 points, including two 3s, and corralled 15 rebounds.

“Honestly, I don’t know how many more years I will be playing because I know I want to be a coach someday,” Ortega said.

“It all depends on things like still having the love and desire, the money situation, my health and when I have a wife and children whether they approve of me playing.

“But whether it is at my alma maters of CSJ or the Hyde School in Maine or somewhere else, I know I want to coach. I think I have been blessed with the ability to be a leader and teach and that’s why I want to coach.”

Ortega grew up playing basketball on the playgrounds of New York City. It was a game he fell in love with at an early age, but a game plenty thought he could not play.

The guy who looked too much like a football player has played professional basketball in the Dominican Republic where he was MVP of an all-star game and is now piling up the points while getting paid to play in Israel.

Maybe, he will have his detractors again when he begins the next phase of his career and dives into to the coaching profession. Coaches always have detractors.

But that’s something Rich Ortega has always handled pretty well.

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