Different Worlds

Somewhere along the five-mile drive to Santa Ana High on Tuesday evening, wrestlers from Santa Ana Calvary Chapel noticed the change.

Calvary Chapel’s team left a private school surrounded by shiny, mirrored office buildings located a few blocks from the posh South Coast Plaza shopping mall in Costa Mesa, where white-collar legions can have designer footwear and expensive diamonds with the swipe of a credit card.

They arrived in a neighborhood filled with run-down apartments.

“It’s not the best neighborhood,” said Calvary Chapel wrestler Joe Williams. “It’s not like our little bubble in our area.”

Calvary Chapel, winners of seven state titles in the last 11 years, went to Santa Ana neither for an easy victory nor to gloat of past success. Calvary Chapel went to Santa Ana because it seeks the best competition.

The teams, while opposites in about every way imaginable, share more than a city: They are both among the elite wrestling programs in Southern California.

Calvary Chapel, winners of a combined 18 Southern Section team and dual-meet titles, is ranked No. 1 by The Times and finished third at the prestigious Five Counties Invitational on Jan. 18. No. 2 Santa Ana has won Southern Section titles in four of the last seven years and was sixth at Five Counties.

Tuesday’s match, a nonleague dual won by Calvary Chapel, 36-28, showcased the clash in cultures and styles as well as how little separates the two on the mat.

Calvary Chapel’s technically sound, methodical defensive wrestlers opened a 22-4 lead. Santa Ana roared back with three consecutive pins to tie the score, 22-22. After Yuri Kalika and Joe Williams gave Calvary Chapel a 33-22 lead, only two weight classes remained and Calvary Chapel was without a heavyweight.

Calvary Chapel Coach Josh Holiday decided to forfeit the 215-pound match and bump Mike Williams, his 215-pounder, to heavyweight. That made the score 33-28 and saved Williams from having to face Luis de La Rosa, the No. 2-ranked 215-pounder in Orange County. All Williams needed was to not get pinned and Calvary would win. He defeated Luis Gonzales, 6-3.

It was the sixth Calvary Chapel victory in seven meetings between the teams, with Santa Ana’s lone victory a 43-21 romp in 1999. The eight-point margin of victory was the closest between the teams since a 32-29 Calvary Chapel victory in 1998.

“I never really thought about it, but it’s amazing how different the teams are,” said David Jauregui, a Calvary Chapel junior who lives a mile from Santa Ana High. “Those guys are tough, I mean they are from Santa Ana. But it’s amazing that these teams are so different but both at the top of high school wrestling.”

The paths each team took to reach that plateau of success differ as much as the schools’ surroundings .

Calvary Chapel has set the standard for high school wrestling. The team attracts wrestlers that have been youth champions. The Christian school with yearly tuition of $5,480 draws mostly from upper middle-class Orange County families.

The team practices in a huge off-campus facility that rivals many colleges. Practices are all business.

“There is a lot of pride here,” Holiday said. “We let the kids have fun sometimes, but these guys are all pretty serious. They have high goals so we can push them pretty hard.”

Santa Ana generally draws kids from poor families in the mostly Latino areas of Santa Ana. Most arrive with little wrestling experience and often join the team after failing at other sports. Still, since 1993, Santa Ana has won four Southern Section team titles, three section dual-meet titles and 10 league titles.

The wrestling room is often overcrowded because Coach Scott Glabb keeps it open to anyone willing to put in the work, whether they’re officially on the team or not.

“It would be nice to get seasoned wrestlers in here and not have to make up for lost time, but we don’t,” Glabb said. “I think as a coach I get the same, if not more, satisfaction turning these kids into winners.”

Calvary Chapel’s success began when John Azevedo started the program in 1990. Azevedo won an NCAA title and was a former Olympian. When he came to Calvary Chapel, top wrestlers flocked to him for instruction.

“It was scary that first year,” said Azevedo, now an assistant at Cal Poly San Luis Obispo. “But we won a [Southern Section] title the second year so it didn’t take long.”

Calvary Chapel’s instant success brought accusations of cheating and recruiting.

“Everyone gets mad at them,” Glabb said. “I say shoot for them. Instead of complaining about them, just chase them down.”

Glabb is doing just that. He wrestled with marginal success in high school and college and coached at Marina High in Huntington Beach. He was hired at Santa Ana when nobody else applied for the job. He said he took over a team made up mostly of gang members looking for a place to waste time after school.

“There were a lot of punks,” Glabb said.

It took a few years, but Glabb built the team into a winner, though there were problems. Glabb is writing a book detailing his experiences at Santa Ana. In it, he tells of a wrestler arrested for running a credit card scam, another who got caught dealing drugs and a freshman arrested for tagging.

Another wrestler was arrested, found to be an illegal immigrant and deported. Glabb visited him in Tijuana. “I bet Calvary never had anyone deported,” he said.

Santa Ana has had two Masters champions and 18 Southern Section champions, but has never had a state champion. Those numbers pale compared to Calvary Chapel, which has had 14 state, 31 Masters and 56 section champions.

But Tuesday night at Santa Ana High, the neighbors from different worlds were separated by the width of a wrestling mat, the shine of an overhead spotlight and the fog coming from a machine in the gym. With the match outcome undecided and one match to go, each team rose from its bench to cheer its teammate.

In that setting, it was difficult to tell them apart.