Wayne State College Women’s Basketball welcomed Brian Ortmeier as the new head basketball coach in late April earlier this year.
Coach Ortmeier takes over after Brent Pollari and Wayne State parted ways following a disappointing 11-16 season in 2024-25. Ortmeier last season at Briar Cliff went 30-6 and appeared in the national semi-finals at the NAIA ranks.
One of the things that stood out to Mike Powicki, Director of Athletics at WSC, was the fact he grew up in Dodge, Nebraska. Powicki knew that Ortmeier was familiar with the region and the kind of talent he could bring in during the hiring process.
“He’s got family in this place, he’s from this place, he’s a Nebraska guy, I think he’s a quality-of-life kind and wants to build something and I think he’s clearly shown the ability to do that,” Powicki said when asked about if he believes Ortmeier could carry out a long tenure at Wayne State College.
Powicki expects Ortmeier’s philosophy to take place immediately in the program.
Powicki stated that Ortmeier was itching to get to campus. Ortmeier had a plan in place and was ready to have it implemented on day one on campus.
“The timing of when we got him hired and into campus, we had just finished our time period in the NCAA where they had just finished postseason workouts, so he has just been in this lurch a little bit unfortunately for him. Certainly, I know he was excited to get the girls in and get back to workouts,” Powicki said.
Ortmeier reflected this by stating his expectations for year one.
“I think anytime you take a new job you kind of look at it more as of a retooling not so much rebuilding you want to retool, make some adjustments to some of the things that they done in the past and we’re looking to be a competitive team in the NSIC this year,” Ortmeier said.
“I think again if people leave the gym saying, ‘that team battled and played hard’ that’s something we want to establish, we want to establish a culture in year one in being a tough team,” Ortmeier said.
Coach Ortmeier also plans to change the strategy of how Wayne State plays this upcoming season.
“We’re going to play an aggressive style of basketball. We’re going to press and we’re going to play up tempo, and we play pretty aggressively in the halfcourt on defense and then offensively we get out in transition, and we roughly averaged anywhere from 80-84 points per game at BCU, so we always shoot it pretty well, we put up a lot of points, I think it’s a fun style of basketball to play,” Ortmeier said.
“We talk a lot about falling in love with the process just getting one percent better every single day and you have that steady improvement you’ll find yourself in the right spot come postseason time and we’re going to set the bar high. I don’t want to come in and set a low bar and act like that’s going to be okay for the first season so we’re going to strive to be the best team we can be and just get a little better every single day,” Ortmeier said on getting Wayne over the postseason hump.
Expectations are high around campus for Coach Brian Ortmeier at Wayne State College, however it’s clear to see those expectations can be met in the eyes of Ortmeier and Powicki. Coach Ortmeier’s first game as head coach at Wayne State will take place on November 14th against Emporia State down in St. Joeseph, Missouri.
