Pushing the limits

If there’s one thing Pete Anderson learned right away as Sage Hill School’s new football coach, it’s that the weight room is too small for Cody Gates.

The 6-foot-4, close-to-300-pounder feels like King Kong stuck inside the Lightning quarters. There’s barely enough space to flex those 17 1/2 -inch biceps. So instead of working out, he instructs, does whatever he can to push the handful of players who can lift inside.

Breaking out for the rest of the night is easy for Gates. After an hour with teammates, he escapes, heads to a bigger compound, the LA Fitness in town. The next four hours will be devoted to him, his muscles, anything to find that edge on the football field. Friday nights are his competition, time to showcase his strength.

The bodybuilders in the gym even marvel at his physique. Some guess his weight, maybe 240 pounds? Back in his freshman year he tipped the scales at 230. No muscles. The only thing chiseled about Gates was by his old Coach Tom Monarch’s doing.

“He would hammer me. He would just say, ‘You are 5-foot-11, you’re big, you have so much potential, yet you’re nowhere close,’ ” Gates said. “I never really understood what he was saying until the end of my sophomore year. That’s when it hit me. I could be a major force.”

Gates is that immovable gate now. Try going through the defensive tackle. You’ll fall on your back or to the side. Gates has built himself up to a giant the last two years the only way he knew how — through an intense strength and conditioning program and healthy diet.

Gates is one those few disciplined, smart and driven high school athletes on a team that understand what’s fueling their body. They listen to it, nourish it, and take advantage of it. The reward is success in health, playing, and the future. Both agree doing it the right way works, without the use of steroids or human growth hormones, which can be harmful to the body, causing heart to liver disease.

Gates isn’t the only athlete in town that embodies this ideal. Follow Costa Mesa High’s Cody De La Mater, who said he has a 3.6 grade-point average. He governs his body like a dictator does a country.

What led these two seniors down the same road differs, almost as their positions and sizes. De La Mater is 5-11, 195 pounds, and a fullback and linebacker. Gates plays on the line.

Gates longed to live up to expectations on the field. Blame his old coach.

De La Mater wanted to live healthy. Blame his grandma.

Both are grateful for what spearheaded them in the right direction as they’re leaders for their respective teams on and off the field.

Gates has cut fast food. De La Mater can tell you the last time he’s drank a soda.

“Last December,” he said, knowing the month because wrestling season began for the 189-pounder and his quest to make the CIF Southern Section individual meet for the second time before the track and field season. “It was a Sprite or Diet Coke. It was too sweet.”

Costa Mesa Coach Jeremy Osso appreciates De La Mater’s work ethic.

“It lifts the other guys,” he said of guys that used to weigh almost as much as the 300 pounds De La Mater can bench press.

Jorge Sandoval was one of those guys. The lineman to De La Mater looked pudgy, with a lot of baby fat.

“He came up to me and asked me how I stayed in shape,” said De La Mater, who advises everyone to drink water instead of soda, and eat vegetables, chicken and fish. “I just told him he had to watch what he ate and he would see the weight fall off. It did.”

There’s a reason De La Mater is always carrying a couple of boxes of Lean Cuisine. Most of the time he’s having lunch with his 86-year-old grandma, Martha Wilder, in Santa Ana.

“I bring her lunch. She’s one tough lady,” he said. “She had a massive heart attack and she didn’t even know it.”

Once Wilder could no longer hide the pain, De La Mater said one of his uncles took her to the hospital. Guess who felt her agony.

“She punched my uncle in the face,” De La Mater said, describing his uncle as a strapping 6-2, 240-pounder. “That night she also had a heart attack. She only has 20% of her heart working.”

The percentage scares De La Mater, so much so that one of the major causes of heart problems is obesity. The epidemic that has hit 32.2% of adults 20 years and older, according to the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey in 2003-04, has struck De La Mater’s family.

Will it touch De La Mater? He said family members tell him, “All the De La Maters get it, so watch out.”

“I’m not next,” he said. “I want my heart to be functioning at more than at 20%.”

To De La Mater, 20 is not a good figure. Reminds him of his grandma’s heart and an offense marching to the red zone, 20 yards away from scoring a touchdown on his defense.

It happened a lot to Costa Mesa last year, when De La Mater, from the sideline, watched the defense give up 55 points in the season opener, followed up by 42 and 41 points. All losses that led to 3-7 overall and 1-2 in the Orange Coast League.

De La Mater missed most of it, except for two plays. He was recovering from torn meniscus surgery in his right knee he said he had in September. The short stint against cross-town rival Estancia in Week 9 created more problems than he expected.

De La Mater said Osso’s suspension for one game during his first season was because he played De La Mater in the game without the proper clearance from a doctor.

De La Mater, who believes he knows his body better than anyone else, including Costa Mesa’s trainer Sheri Daniels, said Daniels deliberately sabotaged his return.

“She called my doctor three times, saying, ‘Are you sure you want to release him?’” said De La Mater, adding Daniels convinced his doctor not to release him. “I thought I had the clearance and I was good to go. Our trainer let officials know that I didn’t and Osso got suspended and I sat out.

“It was hard because I thought I could change the game. I was a leader on the team and people’s heads were down all season. I can deliver hits. But I was standing on the sideline.”

The sideline is one place Gates never wanted to be during games.

Out on the field. Dominating. Delivering bone-crushing hits. That’s where and what Gates pictured while hitting the weights, plenty of time to visualize. Unlike De La Mater, who works out with the team at the school facility, Gates uses a personal trainer.

Gates pays for it himself. Anderson said there are a handful of Sage Hill players who hire personal trainers because of the school’s workout facility is too small for the program’s 40-plus players.

“I would have to shuffle 10 or so guys at a time, and that would take a long time, so I let the guys work out on their own,” said Anderson, who’s taking over a program that went 6-5, 3-1 in the Academy League and reached the first round of the playoffs. “One guy I don’t have to worry about is Gates.”

The first day of practice in August, Anderson got to see Gates up close and personal. Gates showed Anderson that he was in better shape than some of the wide receivers.

In the Academy League, where players tend to be much smaller than in the bigger leagues like the Sunset, Gates is King Kong.

So how does someone like Gates turn into an incredible specimen?

Try this routine during the recent “Hell week,” considered one of the toughest weeks of any football season. Rise at 5 a.m., drink one 17-ounce protein shake and eat a granola bar for breakfast, arrive at Sage Hill at 7, an hour before a three-and-a-half hour practice, to get taped. Then go home for lunch and eat a bowl of pasta with two chicken breasts, a bowl of fruit, and drink another protein shake. Next is a 45-minute nap. Wake up and snack on some Trail mix.

Get ready for practice again, this time from 3:30 and 7. Afterward, grab dinner — Mexican food, a carne asada burrito, with rice and beans, and another protein shake. For snack — another bag of trail mix.

The calories for the day usually range between 6,000 and 8,000. He drinks lots of water, too. Gulps 10 liter bottles.

“I don’t eat potatoes, no bad meats. Just good type of steak, chicken and pork,” said Gates, who benches more than 300, squats more than 400 and has maxed out on the leg press at 1,450 pounds. “I now know that if a car is falling on me that I can tilt it back.”

The power is something Jackie Slater, the Pro Football Hall of Fame member, was impressed with Gates at his linemen camp held at Mater Dei recently. It helped that Slater, the former 6-4, 277-pound tackle, looked at Gates at eye level.

“He’s recommending me to Fresno State,” said Gates, adding that Arizona State and San Diego State are showing interest in the student-athlete, who said he just scored an 1870 on the 2400-point Scholastic Aptitude Test scale. “I would love to play in college. But if I don’t get to, I want to get into the digital art world and do graphic design for websites and the movies. I want to create characters.

“I already play around with design. I created me. I’m this huge monster with spikes. It’s pretty gruesome.”

If like the real-life version of Gates isn’t tough enough.