Former Colt Joe Ehrmann Works to Strengthen Communities Through Sport

Joe Ehrmann is an imposing figure. As a football player, he was an All-American defensive tackle at Syracuse and an All-Pro for the Baltimore Colts, famous for his ability to knock people down -- to keep them from the goal line. As a big man in the community, Joe has made it his business to pick people up and show them strengths they didn't know they had, and how far they can go.

Unlikely as the comparison may seem, Joe sees a link between himself and Dorothy from The Wizard of Oz. The Tin Man, Scarecrow, and Cowardly Lion each had their own perceived deficiencies, but from that motley crew Dorothy made a team.

"She looks them in the eye and affirms their potential," says Ehrmann, who does not wear ruby slippers.

With his hair shorter and grayer than it was in his playing days and a grandfatherly pair of glasses marking a man who doesn't expect full contact anytime soon, Joe says Baltimore is a lot like his hometown of Buffalo, NY. "The weather is much better here," he adds, but the basic biographies of both cities are similar: they are "communities of neighborhoods" that have been scarred by industrial decline and divisive racial politics.

Joe took an interest in Christian ministry during his final years as a professional athlete, and decided to direct lessons learned in seminary to help East Baltimore's poorest communities. "I saw that ghettos in America were man-made," he reflects. As prejudice and bad public policy seeped into urban planning, structures were designed to deny people access. "So then we started working on how to break down those walls."

He and his colleagues got to work confronting and chipping away at barriers that had been built up in physical form by economic and housing powers that be, yet there was another, less tangible trouble Joe sensed roiling across the country. "I came to the conclusion that the single greatest crisis in America, foundational to just about every social problem we have, is the crisis of masculinity -- what it means to be a man."

The threat of not knowing how to love and be loved while remaining confident and strong pervaded all levels of power and wealth. "It wasn't just the kids in the back alleys of East Baltimore who I was working with; it was the men in the boardrooms of this city as well," Joe says.

Nor was the pressing need for awareness and affirmation that strengthens communities limited to the male gender: "How does a girl know when she's become a woman? What does a woman give her life to? What's the value and virtue of femininity?"

After developing those central questions, Ehrmann came to the conclusion that there would be no better place to develop boys into men and girls into women than in the world of sports. Sports, which this ordained minister calls "the secular religion of America," brings cities and alumni bases of millions together to root for teams that represent them. Players, coaches, and fans are all bound together by relationships that move them together toward what Ehrmann calls a "transcendent cause."

And that's the perspective Ehrmann delivers through his non-profit organization Coach for America. "Coaching is about building relational capacity and teaching people how to commit to a cause," he says. Nevertheless, despite all of his athletic and pastoral credentials, Ehrmann and Coach for America sometimes run into hard-headed, drill-sergeant types who are used to breaking down individuals in order to build a unit from scratch.  

When wary coaches first interact with Joe and hear him use terms like "socio-emotional awareness" in relation to physical contests, their top concern is whether a new way of coaching will help them win. "The beauty of it is, it will," Joe replies. "Competition ought to be about a mutual quest for excellence -- you compete against others so that they bring out the best in you." And within teams, better understanding and deeper ties lead to improved performance.

That approach has won Coach for America audiences with NFL teams that bring Joe in to talk about personal conduct and teamwork.

"The reason men go from the sports page to the criminal page is a false concept of masculinity," he observes.

Though Joe is white, he is committed to highlighting sports as a prism through which deep racial, economic, and spiritual issues can be explored. He played lacrosse at Syracuse for coach Roy Simmons, Jr., who taught that in Iroquois tradition, warriors pick up their lacrosse stick in the next world after they die and challenged his players to address injustices to Native Americans. In East Baltimore, Joe interacts with young black athletes to help them articulate the expectations they feel that society has for them. "They have so much misinformation about themselves," Joe says. "It's not who you are that's holding you back, it's who you think you're not."

The next step is to break down those imposed expectations and help developing adults create their own goals and sense of justice, through teamwork.

That's where Joe Ehrmann's work has led him to heavy involvement with Baltimore's Living Classrooms Foundation and its East Baltimore Target Investment Zone initiative. As part of the TIZ, Living Classrooms is teaching job skills to at-risk youth and ex-offenders, mediating gang disputes, improving neighborhood spaces, and building community sports facilities like a new multi-purpose sports field in Patterson Park, which is a collaborative effort with Baltimore Recreation & Parks Department, Baltimore City Public Schools, Under Armour, and the Cal Ripken, Sr. Foundation.

The link between education and sports is critical to reinforcing communities as they rally around and participate in that national secular religion. "Sports ought to be co-curricular," Joe insists, adding that learning time could be extended by hours a day through physical activity and teamwork, touching on the math, biology, and many other subjects that are integral, if unseen, parts of on-field play.

So what does Joe expect for the city he's played for and worked in for nearly four decades? "I get discouraged but I'm incredibly optimistic. I think this is a community of wonderful, civic-minded, philanthropic people. There are heroic people in East and West Baltimore -- they just need some kind of support."

Joe Ehrmann's new book, InSideOut Coaching: How Sports Can Transform Lives is available from Simon & Schuster August 2nd 


Sam Hopkins is a freelance writer and publisher of Bmore Media.


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Photos by Arianne Teeple.