DAILY PILOT HIGH SCHOOL ATHLETE OF THE WEEK:

When Cody De La Mater first entered the Costa Mesa High wrestling room as a freshman, the scene looked like a construction zone.

Just as the place was in dire near of repairs, so was the program. The team consisted of six to eight wrestlers, depending on who wanted to show up that day. Not enough wrestlers to have a complete lineup and compete.

But with the site in a mess, who could blame them?

“We had just this,” said De La Mater, pointing at a small chunk of the present mat. “But it was like cut off. We couldn’t go over here. They were re-doing the room. There were no mats on the wall. We just had this circle to practice on. We had like piles of wood over here. There [were] buckets of water because this place was leaking like crazy.”

Still, De La Mater continued to come. The attraction to the room, he couldn’t get enough of the contact.

He persevered throughout the rebuilding process, the one that only fixed the building.

The team is smaller in his senior year, about half the size on varsity. Only three remain, one of those is De La Mater. And he is glad he stuck around.

De La Mater won his first league championship last week to advance to his third straight CIF Southern Section individual meet. Sure he only had to wrestle once to claim the Garden Grove League’s 189-pound title. Even he admitted “winning league wasn’t really that memorable.”

But the experiences along the way, third-place league finishes the previous two years, has turned De La Mater (19-7) into a different wrestler, a stronger, faster and smarter one. One person who has seen De La Mater’s transformation from the first day is Jesse Franco. The Mustangs’ second-year coach was an assistant during De La Mater’s first two years.

“In the words of one my friends that helps me out every now and then, when he was a freshman, he was a [smart aleck],” Franco said, referring to De La Mater. “Now he’s just a strong [smart aleck].”

For being a joker at times, De La Mater understands the consequences. Franco makes sure to give De La Mater his undivided attention, easy for him to do with a small roster.

“Most of the time he whips my [butt],” De La Mater said. “He takes a little more joy out of it.”

Franco couldn’t wait Friday. De La Mater arrived to practice late, a chiropractor’s visit kept him away. The two teammates, 215-pound senior Tamas Gyorfi and 171-pound junior Juan Garces, also advancing to the Eastern Divisional at La Quinta High in La Quinta on Feb. 15-16, had already gone through an intense workout with Franco.

Gyorfi called De La Mater out before heading out.

“Nobody wants him around,” Gyorfi said. “He’s a big goofball.”

De La Mater just smiled. So did Gyorfi, because without each other, neither of them would be league champs in their last year.

The two wrestling partners will miss this place, the room in which Franco instilled discipline and showed them the way to success. As a former wrestler at Costa Mesa, that’s why Franco is coaching.

Franco could devote more of his time to his family’s small safe business, which secures items for jewelry stores, banks, anything worth a lot. But the wrestlers are his greatest assets.

The walk-on coach is doing his best to acquire more through recruitment on campus. It’s proving to be arduous for a program he said has switched almost as many coaches as it has leagues in the last eight years. It has hurt the continuity and he said it has played a major factor in the Mustangs going the last five years without a team league victory.

“One of the reasons why I graduated from the school was because of wrestling,” said Franco, a 2003 graduate and a member of the last team to win in league. “I wasn’t the most motivated kid. Wrestling helped me stay in school, so I owe it to wrestling. I owe this program the gratitude that it gave me. Plus, we have a bunch of great kids.

“If they didn’t have the sport, they’re just going to be somewhere else getting in trouble, getting into drugs, getting into backyard school fights.”

De La Mater prefers battling on a mat. Any mat, even the old one that will no longer be around after the season.

“Man! Right after I leave you guys are going to replace it?” he said. “It’s cracking everywhere.”

But it sure hasn’t cracked De La Mater.

DAVID CARRILLO PEÑALOZA may be reached at (714) 966-4612 or at [email protected].