Arjay Ortiz
Cardinals’ all-around standout,
They rolled in, one after another.
Some were rude, others hateful and misinformed. Most were just downright mean.
One suggested he’d one day be the best player in prison. Another said he was stupid and hot-headed, unworthy of wearing his school’s uniform.
As if attracted to the sting the words delivered, Arjay Ortiz read nearly all of them. They came in waves for days over social media; at breakfast, in class, overnight as he slept.
“Yeah, it was bad,” Ortiz says. “Facebook, Twitter, all that stuff. Most of those people don’t know anything about me and there they were writing the worst things. That’s not me, that’s not what I’m about. But none of them cared, you know?”
A senior at Las Vegas Robertson, Ortiz had made headlines just days before when he ran into the bleachers to confront heckling fans at St. Michael’s following a district tournament loss in late February. The taunts were relentless.
He’d been hearing them in some form or fashion for years. The son of a pair of (in their words) competitive, type-A personalities — parents who’d made names for themselves as college athletes at New Mexico Highlands and later as teachers and coaches at various schools — Ortiz was used to seeing emotions boiling over.
“He was always in the gym or on the track, with us or doing something on his own,” says Arjay’s mother, April Ortiz. “He was one of those little kids who had that fear of missing out. He had to be down with us on the floor if we were coaching, but if you’re down there you start to see and hear all that stuff. Even as a little kid you hear it.”
As he moved from middle school up to Robertson, Arjay was already one of the most recognized athletes in Las Vegas. He excelled in everything he tried — soccer, baseball, basketball, football. By time he was a junior, he was one of the top athletes in Northern New Mexico.
As a senior in 2017-18, he was a well-established three-sport star, leading the Robertson football team to the state championship game three years in a row. He carried the Cardinals’ basketball team into the playoffs despite a roster that was more JV than varsity. He was a multi-event track star in the spring.
His accomplishments and all the gaudy stats made him an easy choice as The New Mexican’s North Stars Athlete of the Year for 2017-18.
On that cold night in Santa Fe, however, push literally came to shove. No punches were thrown and Arjay left the St. Mike’s gym almost as quickly as he’d marched up the first few rows to confront the fans, but the damage was clearly done.
“I could see it in his eyes,” said Arjay’s father, Benny Ortiz. “I knew he was about to break.”
The New Mexico Activities Association suspended Arjay from the Cardinals’ state tournament opener at powerhouse Albuquerque Hope Christian. The ruling came down just two days before the game.
The Ortiz family gathered outside the meeting room with a Robertson administrator and the school’s basketball coach. Everyone was prepared to file an injunction, to fight the ruling long enough to help Arjay play at state.
“We’re all heartbroken and crying and talking about what to do next,” April says. “It was Arjay’s decision not to fight it. He said he wanted to let it go, that he didn’t want his name out there anymore and that he would accept the consequences. That was the moment where my son had matured and become a man because he took it, accepted it and decided to move on.”
In some ways, she said, it was one of the best things that ever happened to Arjay. He’d matured practically overnight in the face of adversity — much the same way he became a leader in the wake of what he describes as the worst moments he’d ever had in football.
It was homecoming week of his sophomore year. Capital was in town and the Jaguars were pushing all the right buttons in the first half behind star quarterback Augie Larrañaga. Ortiz had missed a key tackle that led directly to one score, then threw an interception moments later.
A handful of older teammates began lashing out on the field, then the coaches chewed him out on the sidelines. At halftime it erupted as teammates tag-teamed their criticisms to the point where Ortiz stormed out of the locker room and was benched the rest of the game.
“Yeah,” he says. “They were on me and I probably didn’t handle it the best, but the next day in film some of those guys talked to me and we worked it out.”
The Cardinals won 10 straight games that season but lost in the state championship at Hatch Valley. While the team may have lost, it was actually the program’s gain. Ortiz had become a bona fide leader who, at the age of just 16, took no flak from anyone.
“I was always kind of joking and having fun before that,” he says. “After that I was always serious on the field, in practices, in the locker room. Leaders can’t be out there laughing when things go wrong.”
His junior year was even better, but it ended the same. The football team lost again in the title game, the basketball team beat rival West Las Vegas in the state tournament but was pounded by Hope in the semifinals, and Arjay was still finding his way in track.
But everything fell into place this past season. He was easily the top quarterback in Class 4A, leading the Cards back to the championship game — another loss — while leading the state in blocked shots in hoops. In track he dominated the 300-meter hurdles and finished the state meet with the second-most points of anyone in 4A.
Perhaps most notably, Ortiz also had a ferocious bout with mononucleosis. It started in late December and lingered into March. Already a lean 6-foot-2 and 163 pounds when he got sick, he dropped below 150 during basketball season. He felt completely drained and lethargic but still led the team in scoring (21.0), rebounds (7.9), assists (3.9), blocks (2.3) and steals (2.1). It wasn’t until this spring that he finally started to feel better.
Once he did, the energy came back like a tidal wave and he packed on nearly two dozen pounds of muscle to get to his current 171.
He signed to play football at Highlands in February, passing up chances to play at Eastern New Mexico and a couple of small schools out of state. The Cowboys recruited him as a quarterback but have floated the idea of moving him to safety or
wide receiver.
“Honestly, I’d like a redshirt year just so I can get into the weight room, learn their playbook and get a little older, but if they wanted me at kicker I’d go out there right now and do that,” Arjay says.
If anything defined Arjay as an athlete his senior year, it was the sheer lunacy of his improvisational skills as a quarterback. Although his team beat Ortiz in the championship game last December, Ruidoso head coach Kief Johnson said after a wild 57-54 victory that game-planning for Robertson’s offense was nearly impossible because Ortiz was completely unpredictable once things broke down.
“You got him running around all over the place, extending plays and making my guys miss,” Johnson said at the time. “You think you got him and there he is making some crazy play look easy.”
In what would have been the signature moment of Arjay’s football career, he pulled a final rabbit out his hat when he scrambled free on fourthand-18 from his own 30 in the final two minutes with his team trailing by a field goal. He bought enough time to send a wobbly bomb into triple coverage 48 yards away, a pass that was caught to keep the drive alive. The Cards scored two plays later but, memorably, gave up the game-winning touchdown to Ruidoso with just five seconds left.
“I’ll remember things like that, yeah, but not so much the loss as it’s the other things,” Arjay says. “Just being out there with my best friends, my brothers, playing for a championship at home. Things like that are what I’ll take with me.”
The ability to squelch the noise will be Ortiz’s mission as a college athlete. With the hope of one day suiting up at quarterback at NMHU or possibly playing a little basketball in the Wilson Complex for the Cowboys, he knows he’s got the unwavering support of a family that understands his passion as much as they feel the pain when someone criticizes him for having it.
“People are going to say whatever they want about how he plays,” April says. “One thing they shouldn’t do is question his character, but they do it anyway. What they don’t see is someone who always has the desire to get better and put in the work to do it. He’s had lapses just like everyone else, but they don’t see the maturity he’s learned from being out there in those situations.”
On the brink of the next chapter in his life, Arjay Ortiz has the kind of perspective some young adults never quite achieve. When he takes stock of his life, he sees opportunities where sports provided a chance to learn the hard way.
They were lessons forged in good times and bad.
“I didn’t ever think I’d stay in Las Vegas because I always had that feeling of wanting to leave,” Arjay says. “Of all the offers I got, Highlands was the best and, yeah, the more I think about it the better I feel about it. I’ve gone through a lot to get here and this is where I want to be.”