Harrison Fuller is an ASU Cronkite School of Journalism student assigned to cover Arizona Lutheran Academy for AZPreps365.com

PHOENIX — If you walk into Arizona Lutheran Academy, you’ll see more Green Bay Packers and Minnesota Vikings jerseys than Arizona Cardinals jerseys.

If you ask the teachers at this school of fewer than 250 students where they went to college, you’ll get the same answer.

The explanation for both traces to New Ulm, Minnesota.

Martin Luther College is a small institution in New Ulm of fewer than 900 students. It’s operated by the Wisconsin Evangelical Lutheran Synod (WELS) and supplies the teachers for every school under the synod in the country. Arizona Lutheran is among the 29 WELS high schools in the United States. 

While MLC has sent teachers to Phoenix for years, this year marks the beginning of a true partnership between the two schools.

"They sponsor us all the time by coming down to visit, to recruit," ALA athletic director and MLC graduate Justin Ohm said. "They'll send care packages. They'll connect with the students that we have sent up there. They make sure that they're connected with us.”

MLC donated more than $2,000 to Arizona Lutheran and is now promoted over the loudspeaker at football games and listed on the school’s sponsor page, alongside family-owned businesses, realty companies and the local Chick-fil-A. 

Ohm and the rest of the school’s teaching staff did not choose Arizona Lutheran, it chose them.

“You get assigned out of college to go teach somewhere,” Ohm said. “You don't have a say. You go there, and you're happy to go.”

Oct. 15 to April 15 is what is known as a “call window.” This is when schools under the WELS from around the nation call MLC graduates to inquire about open teaching positions. Teachers may not have a choice where they go directly out of college, but they can decline calls if they are currently employed.

Ohm was assigned to teach grades fourth through eighth at a school in Hadar, Nebraska, that had 17 total students. He and his wife were the only teachers at the school for the entire five-year span in which they taught there. 

After half a decade, he received a call from Crown Life Lutheran Church in St. Paul, Minnesota, to be an athletic director and a fifth-grade teacher. He spent the next 11 years there.

But after spending his entire life in the Midwest, Ohm wanted to venture outside his familiar surroundings. In 2022, he got a call to the Valley that would allow him to do just that. 

He’s been at Arizona Lutheran ever since, and has had the opportunity to hire other MLC alumni to his teaching and coaching staff.

Ohm hired Seth Zimmermann in 2025 as an assistant football coach and a math, science and religion instructor. 

Zimmermann had never coached football before coming to ALA, but has had a fruitful beginning to his coaching career, leading the Coyotes to a 6-2 start in his first season at the helm.

Ohm said he has grown to love living in Arizona, but that there are definitely some things he misses about his home state.

“I miss the seasons,” he said. “I miss the friends that I had up there. I don't miss the snow and the ice. The winters are beautiful down here. So there's good and bad things about everything. So it's been an interesting and awesome adventure.”