A Successful Transplant : Opponents Have Not Been Able to Solve Costa Mesa’s Riddell

When the travels of Tyler Riddell ground to a halt a year ago, the timing couldn’t have been better for him or the football team at Costa Mesa High School.

Riddell found a home in the Mustang backfield, and one season later, Costa Mesa has found itself with the leading scorer in Orange County.

The senior running back has scored 11 touchdowns, rushed for 509 yards in 84 carries and caught 21 passes for 361 yards this season.

“I never expected this,” Riddell said. “It just crept up on me.”

But covering a great deal of ground is hardly foreign to Riddell. He has lived in so many cities during his father’s career as an education writer and football coach, he can’t even name them all.

“Probably nine or 10 different places, I can’t exactly remember,” he said. “Arizona, Colorado, Redlands, Rialto, Foster City--that was the longest I lived anywhere, six years in Foster City.”

Initially, he was not enthusiastic about the prospect of leaving the Bay Area city, where he played running back and quarterback on a club football team. But this transplant has turned out to be such a success that Costa Mesa has moved to first place on the Riddell livability index of Western cities.

Of course, Riddell’s assessment does not reflect the same priorities as most other people’s--the weather or taxes or real estate prices. His conclusion is based solely on what has happened on the football field.

In the past, Costa Mesa has been anything but a football power. The Mustangs have had just two winning seasons in 27 years, the most recent in 1978.

But Riddell came to Costa Mesa just as the Mustangs’ fortunes were on the verge of improving. After a 3-7 season in 1985, Costa Mesa got off to its best start in years this season.

The Mustangs easily won their first three games before dropping their last two. Last week, Costa Mesa lost to Corona del Mar, 30-28, on a field goal with 17 seconds left. In half a season, the Mustangs have already won as many games and scored more points than they did in Coach Tom Baldwin’s other two seasons combined.

Baldwin says the addition of Riddell has played a significant role.

“We’ve been able to build a lot of things around him,” Baldwin said. “He can get the job done in a hurry. He gives us the big-play potential, the ability to score from any place on the field.”

No one was predicting that Riddell would make such an impact when he attended his first Mustang practice a year ago. The fifth game of the season sounds like a terrible time to try to break into the lineup, but injuries to two of the best Mustang players, linebackers and running backs Mike Szyperski and Scott Anderson, created an immediate opportunity.

Since then, Riddell’s movements have been tracked in yards and touchdowns, rather than along a trail of change-of-address cards.

At 5-foot 7-inch and 140 pounds, his physique hardly summoned the image of a bruising cornerback or running back. He didn’t look like the sort of player capable of making such a big impression that Sea View League coaches would make him an all-league defensive back--despite the fact he had played only five games and was a junior.

Riddell recalled his first day on the team: “I came to practice and told them how fast I was, but everyone said something like, ‘No way, you’re too small.’ But then I started running and they said, ‘Whoa . . .’ ”

As soon as Riddell started to move, Baldwin said, it was obvious he was something out of the ordinary.

“As soon as I saw him run and jump and throw the ball, I knew he could play,” Baldwin said. “I’ve been coaching for 30 years, and some things you can just tell.”

Riddell’s best performances this season have come in a 35-8 victory over Rancho Alamitos, when he rushed for 188 yards and scored 3 touchdowns, and in a 26-6 victory over Estancia, when he gained 177 yards and scored all 4 touchdowns.

Defensively, in the Mustangs’ 21-7 loss to Newport Harbor, he was assigned to cover Mark Craig, a 6-6 All-Southern Section wide receiver. Although one sportswriter said Riddell looked like “a flea on a giraffe,” he limited Craig to 2 catches for 25 yards, Craig’s least productive game this year. One of the receptions came out of a formation in which Craig played tight end, away from Riddell’s coverage. Meanwhile, on offense, Riddell caught 7 passes for 120 yards.

Aside from his speed, intensity may be Riddell’s greatest asset. Teammate Mike Richie, the Mustangs’ leading wide receiver, remembers Riddell getting ready for games last year by smashing his head into trash cans at lunch time.

“He’s a pretty popular dude,” Richie said, joking. “Everyone knows Tyler--maybe because he hits his head on trash cans.”

But this year Riddell has a more statesmanlike reputation to maintain. After all, the leading scorer in the county and the vice president of Costa Mesa’s senior class can’t really go around assaulting metal objects with his head.

He would like to play college football, but his lifelong dream is to become an astronaut.

“I used to dream about the stars,” he said. Then his sense of humor reasserted itself and he said with a laugh, “But I’ll probably be a business man. Want to buy an encyclopedia?”

Either way, there’s no doubt Tyler Riddell will be doing a lot of traveling.