Little Shaver Thinking Big : Alemany’s 119-Pounder Castaneda Will Make Bid for State Wrestling Title

Alemany High wrestler James Castaneda recently shaved his head, but sometimes he needs to let his hair down.

“When you’re wrestling, you feel like you’re in power,” the 119-pound junior says softly, as politely as he says everything. “It feels like if you want to fight or something, but it’s legal.”

Who could begrudge him such lawful stress-relief?

Off the wrestling mat, Castaneda, 16, performs a two-point takedown on loutish behavior. He always opens doors for females, he tries never to cuss and he earns a 3.8 grade-point average.

“People make fun of me for (all) that,” he says.

He also treads the straight and narrow as a wrestler. Three workouts per day. No fatty foods. Total dedication to the sport. Of course, if a teammate ventured to make fun of him for all that, Castaneda could put him in a headlock. Or simply point to his accomplishments.

Competing at the 103-pound level last season, Castaneda won the Southern Section Division IV championship, was runner-up at the Masters Meet (all divisions of the Southern Section) and advanced to the semifinals of the state finals.

Results like those, combined with his soft-spoken intensity, are reasons enough for his teammates to look up to the 5-foot-5 Castaneda.

“Even when he was a freshman, he was the man,” says Alemany’s 171-pound senior, Eddie Moran. “He’s pushed us to work harder. He’s our incentive to work out.”

Moran says this while sitting next to Castaneda on a bench at the school. Then he breaks into a huge grin and punches Castaneda on the shoulder.

“Yeah!” Moran yells, laughing.

The laugh disappears. Moran sticks out his hand to Castaneda.

“Five bucks (for the compliment),” he says. Moran laughs again and turns to the reporter.

“Actually, I’m being totally honest,” he said. “(Castaneda) has a good reputation with the teachers and the faculty. He’s very well-respected. I don’t think anyone hates him in the whole school.”

Undoubtedly, Castaneda’s opponents resist feeling warm and fuzzy about him. It’s hard to like someone who just beat you.

Wrestling at 112 pounds last season before dropping to 103 late in the season (he will drop from 119 to 112 later this season), he posted a 44-3 record. His only losses were in the Masters meet, the state semifinals and the ensuing consolation match. But his 3-0 semifinal loss to Elsinore’s Damon Broadbent--whom he beat a week earlier--still bothers him. Castaneda emerged from that bout with a black eye and tears in his eyes.

“I still think about it now and it gets me mad,” he said. “I don’t know why but I can’t get it off my mind.”

Perhaps because wrestling--and winning--are his life’s focal points.

He started wrestling when he was 5 in freestyle summer tournaments. As he grew, he headed to the Alemany gym, watching and learning from his brother, Sergio, who was also a lightweight wrestler for the Indians. He still wrestles with Sergio, 23, now Alemany’s junior varsity coach, as part of his nightly two-hour workout in the family’s garage-turned-wrestling ring in Sylmar.

Castaneda trains with the team each morning at 5:30 for two hours. After school, he runs four miles on the school track--where he is such a constant figure that the school’s cross-country and track coach tried to talk him into running for Alemany.

Nope, said Castaneda, I’m a wrestler.

“You get into another world, another state of mind,” he said. “You get real concentrated and block everything out. Nothing can conquer me.”

His aggressiveness is not contrived. As a sophomore, he played cornerback for Alemany’s junior varsity football team and loved the violent contact. As a hobby, though, he sometimes plays tennis.

Tennis!? What an intriguing dichotomy!

“You can hit the ball real hard,” he said.

Oh, that figures.

Surprisingly, this buck-and-change bundle of combativeness says he needs to be more assertive while wrestling.

“The thing I don’t do is realize I can beat people really easy,” he said. “So I go out there kind of timid.

“So I start hitting myself, slapping myself everywhere, telling myself that nobody could beat me,” he said. “It gets me pumped up.”

Actually, he is an intriguing dichotomy, because nothing fractures his courteous deportment.

“He’s such a polite young man,” Coach Dennis Henderson said. “It’s kind of odd in our society today. He never says a word that shouldn’t be spoken.”

And as a wrestler?

“Oh, I think he could be the state champ.”