A medical diagnosis ended Zach Orr’s career. Then it led to his calling.

If you wake up early enough to get to the gym with Zach Orr — few people do — you’ll see the 32-year-old doesn’t lift like a former NFL linebacker.

He does a lot of stretches. Many of his lifts aren’t heavy, an anomaly in a weight room dominated by stacking plates for Olympic-style lifts. But, even though it’s apparent Orr is in good shape, you won’t see him doing barbell squats.

“People like, ‘Man, put some weight on there.’ I’m like, ‘Man, I’m good, I’m good. Don’t worry about me,’” Orr told me recently. “But I don’t put anything behind my head or on my back just because, when I do that, I start feeling stuff.”

“Stuff” is what Orr feels when he triggers the nerves running down his spine, a bundle of the most sensitive parts of his body charting a perilous path by a herniated disc in his back and a C-1 vertebra that a doctor once warned him could “explode” if he continued to play football at 24 years old. “Stuff” can be a precariously wide-ranging term — from a tingle in the extremities to a lightning bolt of agony up and down your whole body.

Eight years removed from his diagnosis, a medical opinion that brought Orr’s All-Pro playing career to an abrupt end, he no longer thinks much about what it ended. Injury was a launching pad for Orr — the start of a coaching career that has seen him rocket to become one of the youngest coordinators in the NFL.

Orr may have risen to these ranks anyway, but not so early and not with so much drive. What once felt like a burden was actually a blessing.

‘A degree in spines’

I know a little bit about what Orr has dealt with.

In 2016, I had surgery for herniated discs in my L4 and L5 vertebrae, which had reduced me to nearly a shut-in who could neither walk nor sit upright for long periods without being jolted by searing needles of pain. I dealt with the confusion of not knowing what was wrong, the frustration of trying nonsurgical options, the tedious steps through therapy and recovery to get back to not quite who I used to be but something like it.

Orr and I commiserated about some of this overlap, down to the years when we both were forced to reckon with the issues with our spines. For Orr, this arrived at a high point right after the 2016 season, when he had racked up 133 tackles and three interceptions to earn All-Pro honors.

His life was going according to plan — suddenly, his doctor’s words tore his plan apart.

Orr wrote about this extensively in 2017 in an article with The Players’ Tribune. For months, he exhaustively googled everything he could find on spine injuries, on the condition that made his C-1 less developed than his other vertebrae, on cases that could make him the exception to the rule.

Desperation to return to familiar patterns of life is something anyone who has had a debilitating spine injury understands. In Orr’s case, it might have been denial, too.

“I was calling different people, just trying to find a sliver of hope that maybe somebody would clear me, or maybe it might be a treatment or a surgery or something that can get me back out there on the field,” he said. “But I’ve seen so many spine specialists, read so many doctor reports, read so many studies. At that time, I probably could have got a degree in spines.”

I know what Orr means when he talks about the exercises he avoids, and the mobility work he’s added to his routine. When I was done with a six-week postsurgical rehab stint, my physical therapist handed me a worksheet of core exercises. I asked how long I’d be doing them.

“For the duration,” he said. It took a few seconds to dawn on me that he meant the rest of my life.

But I also know how being almost immobile changed how I thought about life and using the time I had, which I suddenly appreciated was not guaranteed. I traveled more, seizing on international trips that I had put off. When I was able to exercise again, I ran hundreds more miles per year than I did before I got hurt. I pursued career goals more aggressively. I was more thankful for time with my family.

Orr has been through that, too.

The first challenge, though, was letting go. Orr’s dad, Terry, played in the NFL, and being an NFL player was the only career he ever envisioned. There was no backup plan, especially at 24 on the verge of scoring his first big contract. Orr had surgery on a bothersome right shoulder and rehabbed like a maniac, as if he might return to an NFL field any day.

“You feel like you’re building a career, [and] it comes to a screeching halt,” he said. “It was tough, and I felt like I was like, ‘Man, I had so much more to give.’ You know what I mean? In my mind and my spirit and my heart, I’m like, ‘Man, I could still go out here and do this.’ But, physically, I just couldn’t.”

It took words from his older brother, Terry Orr II, whom Zach describes as his life coach, to start pursuing what was next. When Ravens owner Steve Bisciotti offered him a coaching job , it clicked for Orr what that next thing was.

“I found this is my purpose,” Orr said. “I was like, ‘I’m gonna make something new of this.’”

Taking accountability

When 30-year-old safety Eddie Jackson met Orr upon arriving in Baltimore, it felt uncanny to shake the hands of a coach who was born only one calendar year before him.

“When I first came in, I thought it was a little funny — like, ‘This is the DC? He’s the youngest guy I’ve been around as a DC,’” Jackson said. “But I feel like he can relate to his players more.”

Orr’s youth can be jarring for his position. He’s younger than Brent Urban and Kyle Van Noy, two of the players he coaches. But he’s not as much of a peer as he used to be. Players 26 and under have different music and different fashion, Orr said. Trenton Simpson responds to him by saying, “yes, sir,” which makes Orr cringe.

But as you get older — and you move up the ladder — you start getting used to seniority. As a defensive coordinator, John Harbaugh said, he’s seen Orr’s directness come across in coaching sessions where he sets clear expectations and what to work on.

“He’s just consistent, honestly,” safety Kyle Hamilton said. “If we’re up by 30 or we’re in a close game, and I think consistency helps us just calm down ’cause not like the world is falling on us or something like that or, um, like not a panic. It’s just more so, OK, let’s reset what happened with what did we do wrong, how could we improve on it? I think that helps us just calm down.”

In the Ravens locker room, players use words like “positive,” and “relentless” about Orr, whose motor may have made him the natural successor at defensive coordinator when he was promoted in February. And so far they’ve needed every drop of Orr’s energy.

After his predecessor, Mike Macdonald, led the Ravens’ defense to lead the NFL in scoring, sacks and interceptions last season, Orr has had enormous pressure on him. Adding to that is the performance of the first three weeks of the season. Although the 1-2 Ravens have allowed a league-best 150 yards on the ground, the secondary has surrendered 946 passing yards, ranking last in the NFL.

In meetings, players have said, Orr has been the first to claim accountability for the shortcomings, saying he needs to call plays faster or get the defense in better position. Many of these problems, they say, aren’t Orr’s fault. After the Ravens lost their season opener to Kansas City, a game in which the defense made a fourth-quarter stop that gave them a chance to win, Orr was the first to say he had to call plays faster to help the defense out.

“One thing I like about Zach is he takes a lot of accountability for himself,” Jackson said. “Even if we might feel he called a good game, he might come in here and say it was on him.”

One of Orr’s most powerful tools is what he never has to say. Many coaches preach that players shouldn’t waste a minute in practice, shouldn’t waste a rep, because you never know when it might be over.

With Orr, that lesson is implicit. His players know his story.

“Just looking at his career, looking at his paths and seeing that he never quit — things like that definitely helps me out in the way that I think of life and the way that I think of things on the football field,” linebacker Malik Harrison said. “I call Zach a fighter because of everything he’s been going through.”

In that spirit, Orr’s players try to be fighters, too.

A distant dream

When your body turns against you, you learn quickly what physical traits you’re grateful for.

Orr was a rough-and-tumble kid who loved horseplay with his brothers. That part of his life has ended. For a long time after his shoulder operation, he couldn’t even lift his right arm, much less throw a football. One of the high points of not playing football anymore is that he has a better chance of avoiding surgery for the rest of his life, a luxury afforded to few NFL veterans.

“I’ll tell people, I say, ‘Y’all think I’m playing. I’m dead serious,’” he said. “I do not want to have to get surgery ... by just running around playing around and actually not playing football.”

Orr’s original ambition was to play a decade or more in the NFL, but he’s aging out of his hypothetical career. He doesn’t think much anymore about the snaps he never got to play or the tackles he never got to make. Those dreams feel increasingly distant.

In his second or third year coaching — Orr can’t pinpoint which game — a Ravens defender collided with an opponent so hard it made a distinctive crunch. From the sideline, Orr shuddered at the sound. That was when he knew the urge to play football had left him.

“That was the first time where I heard and seen a football hit and I thought to myself, ‘Dang, I don’t ever want to get hit like that,’” Orr said. “And that right there showed me like, yeah. Yeah, I’m done with this. It allowed me to put that all to bed.”

Orr remembers what it was like for his father, who broke four bones in his back and had to retire after eight NFL seasons. He didn’t play catch with his sons — partly because he didn’t want them to follow him into football but also because he physically couldn’t.

His own son, Zach Orr II, is 6. As a dad, Zach Sr. recognizes how much mobility he has because his own playing career was cut short. He’s grateful that he has many more years to play basketball with his kid or challenge him to a footrace.

“My knees don’t hurt,” Orr said. “I’m not really super beat up from the game, so I get out there and run around with him. He likes to talk a lot of trash, so I gotta stay right, so I’m going to try to beat him as long as possible.”

It can be hard to see the sky above when you’re in a tailspin, but Orr pulled out of it and has only ascended. Playing football was the dream he had as a kid, but coaching was his real calling.

The people around him are eager to see how far he can go.

“It’s really a credit to him, his hard work and everything he’s gone through to use as motivation,” linebacker Roquan Smith said. “He’s gonna continue to keep getting better with time. I’m excited I’m here with him early on, and that I know I’m gonna look back 10, 15 years from now and be like, ‘Wow,’ at just how special that guy was.”