Invaluable lessons can be learned on a basketball court.
So says LAPD Capt. Anita Ortega, a national championship-winning former UCLA point guard who believes that it was through basketball that she developed the leadership skills and self-assuredness needed to command the largest division in the nation's third-largest city police force.
"Athletics in general prepared me for this," Ortega, 50, says during an interview in her downtown office, an inviting space decorated with framed jerseys and trophies. "I didn't have many problems getting acclimated to law enforcement."
Women from backgrounds other than sports, the trailblazing Ortega says, sometimes struggle with the job's corporeal and emotional demands.
"What athletics did for me, it prepared me physically, because where I grew up, I played a lot of basketball with guys," she says. "It taught me about teamwork, confidence and all those things you need to be a police officer. All those things you see in athletics are very closely related to law enforcement."
Ortega oversees nearly 600 sworn and civilian employees as commanding officer of the Los Angeles Police Department's communications division, a lofty position that surely must have seemed well beyond the reach of a young girl from South Los Angeles.
The oldest of three children born to a Puerto Rican father and African American mother, Ortega says she grew up in trying circumstances near USC. Her family, including a brother and sister, lived in a two-bedroom apartment, Ortega says, and never owned a car, went out to dinner or took a vacation.
Sports provided an outlet -- though, as Ortega notes, "Where I grew up, we didn't have tennis courts, swimming pools or golf courses."
Instead, she found basketball at Toberman Park, playing with a group of guys that gave her a chance and, she says, still holds a special place in her heart. "Why I gave it a shot," she says of the game that changed her life, "I don't know."
Whatever the reason, she excelled at it, helping Los Angeles High reach the City final in 1975 before walking on at UCLA, where a year earlier Ann Meyers had become the first Bruins woman awarded a basketball scholarship.
Ortega was a four-year starter for the Bruins, who won a national title in her junior year and also reached the Final Four when she was a senior. In the 1978 victory over Maryland at Pauley Pavilion that gave UCLA the Assn. for Intercollegiate Athletics for Women championship, Ortega was the Bruins' leading scorer.
