Renteria is taking his goals to the Max

Oregon State senior Maximo Renteria wants to end his college career by winning the 125-pound division at the NCAA Championships March 19-21 in Cleveland (courtesy Allie Grant/OSU wrestling)

CORVALLIS — Maximo Renteria could be three years into his quest to be a UFC world champion. That has been a goal since he was a youngster growing up in central California.

For now, however, those plans are on hold. Renteria’s focus is on old-fashioned collegiate wrestling — freestyle, if you will.

The Oregon State senior intends to make a big splash in what could be the final month of his wrestling career with performances in the Pac-12 Championships March 6 at San Luis Obispo, Calif., and the NCAA Championships March 19-21 at Cleveland.

“Maximo is a guy who can go deep in the (NCAA) tournament,” says Oregon State coach Chris Pendleton, who is not given to making such predictions.

Renteria is intent on taking it day by day. But he doesn’t mind talking about what is ahead.

“I think I can win an NCAA title,” says the Beavers’ 125-pounder, who is 18-2 and ranked nationally by Flowrestling (eighth) and Wrestlestat (10th). “That can come from delusion, or from confidence within myself, or from the people around me who believe in me. But I truly believe I can win the NCAAs, and I will.”

Renteria pauses. An interview with Maximo has frequent pauses, sometimes in the middle of a sentence. He seems to be thinking about what he is saying before he says it. And then he says it.

“I am … I am trying to focus on every day individually and trying to do my best,” he says. “And ultimately, I want to win NCAAs. But I know I have to show up and have the right attitude of mind.”

Renteria has done that all but once this season, in the Jan. 4 matchup with No. 2-ranked Ohio State at Gill Coliseum. The Buckeyes rolled 41-3, and Renteria got rolled, too, with a 19-4 technical fall administered by third-ranked Nic Bouzakis.

“It was a big crowd against a big opponent at home, and Max was probably too amped up,” OSU assistant coach Josh Rhoden says. “You put them in a tournament, you get a different outcome. I don’t think Bouzakis would beat him by that kind of margin.”

“Maximo put more weight on that match than needed to be,” says Brandon Kaylor, a volunteer assistant and Renteria’s prime workout partner. “He was trying to do everything perfect. When he lets it fly and cuts loose, he is better. I think it is a good thing to lose the way he did when he did. If they wrestle in March, it won’t be the same.”

Renteria feels the same way.

“I just didn’t show up,” he says. “I was there, but I didn’t show up with the right attitude. That is why you have to focus on competition day. You have to be ‘both feet in’ and train the mental part by being there and putting in the effort and wanting to perform.”

He pauses. Shakes his head.

“It’s quite simple,” Renteria says. “I have no excuses. I will show up next time. I want that one back. I want to wrestle him again, and people will see that outcome that happened here wasn’t like me.”

His other loss this season was in the finals of the prestigious Cliff Keen Invitational at Las Vegas in early December. Renteria won seven of eight matches in the tournament but fell 8-6 to West Virginia’s Jett Strickenberger after leading 5-4 after two periods. A controversial call in the closing seconds took away a reversal by Renteria and gave the match to Strickenberger, currently ranked No. 11.

“And Max was working toward a takedown as it ended,” Rhoden says. “It was an exciting match. For seven minutes, they were like two squirrels fighting out there.”

So no shame for a loss there. But plenty of chagrin for a lack of aggressiveness when he faced Bouzakis.   

“Max has been so offensive and looking to score this entire season outside of the one match, which was the anomaly,” Rhoden says.

Overall, it has been a wildly successful season for Renteria, 23, who by all accounts has grown as both a wrestler and a human being since his transfer from Illinois back in 2023.

“I made the decision to come here,” he says, “and I have loved it here ever since.”

Maximo is the second youngest of five children to his mother, Nicole, a cosmetologist. He was born in Visalia and moved to Clovis -- a suburb of Fresno — during his middle-school years. His birth father “wasn’t in my life,” he says. “The man who stepped up is Ernesto Lopez. He was the father figure for a large part of my life.”

An older sister, Regina Lopez, “opened my eyes to wrestling when I was six or seven,” Max says.

He soon found there is no getting around the work required to excel.

“I like that it is an exposing sport,” Renteria says. “It is all based on your performances leading up to competition. If you don’t work hard, it will show up on the mat. I also like that if you are working hard and you do all the right things, it will show.”

Renteria was a three-time CIF state champion at Clovis’ Buchanan High.

“He was one of the top-rated high school wrestlers in the country,” Pendleton says. “Three state titles in California aren’t easy to come by.”

Renteria was denied a chance for a fourth straight title in 2020 due to Covid cancelling the state meet.

“I didn’t really care, to be honest,” he says. “But Covid made me rush my decision to committing (to Illinois).”

Renteria was 1-3 his first season at Illinois, then went 4-14 as a redshirt freshman in 2022-23 for the Fighting Illini. That was the end of the line for him in Champaign.

“I don’t regret going there,” he says. “I don’t think it was a bad decision. It was a good decision, because I learned a lot. I was able to experience things at that school I probably wouldn’t have experienced elsewhere. I am happy I did. I am here because of it.”

After his second season, Illinois coaches took Renteria aside.

“They said, ‘We don’t think it’s a good idea for you to continue to go to school here,’ ” he says. “At first it was a hard thing to swallow from coaches I thought had my back. But after some time, I could see they were trying to help me, and they did. They got me out of a bad place.”

How so?

“The school was fun,” he says. “I had a lot of fun outside of wrestling, too. I was going out to bars. It came to the point where they said, ‘It’s not smart for you to be here at this school.’ I took it the wrong way at first, but ultimately they were trying to help me out, and they did.”

Renteria put his name in the transfer portal, but it looked like his wrestling career might be over. He returned to Clovis with his eye on beginning a UFC career. For about a month, he worked out at a UFC gym called “Red Wave.”

“I was training with Brandon Moreno’s team,” Renteria says. “One day, I was hitting pads with somebody and one of the coaches came over. He asked what I was doing with my life. I said, ‘I’m going to start fighting.’ He asked why I wasn’t in school. He was like, ‘You are too good to quit wrestling.’ He said, ‘Oregon State will call you tomorrow.’

“Tomorrow comes, and Nate Engel calls me. I would say that phone call changed my life in a lot of ways.”

Engel was then an Oregon State assistant. He had a conversation with former OSU assistant Isaiah Martinez — who was by then an assistant at Illinois — about Renteria.

The Dean of Portland Sports is now on BlueSky.

“This kid is a good wrestler,” Martinez told Engel. “He has to clean up the rest of his life, but he is a good kid, and he could be a really good teammate.”

Kaylor had just finished a junior season in which he was an All-American for the Beavers at 125.

“I thought it could be a perfect scenario,” says Engel, now coaching with the women’s team at the U.S. Olympic training center in Colorado Springs. “BK could take him under his wing. As coaches, we had to clean up his academics, his lifestyle. I told Max, ‘Why don’t you come? It will be a second chance for you. The UFC can wait.’ ”

Renteria didn’t need much convincing. His high school teammate, Matthew Olguin, was already a fixture on the OSU team.

“That weekend, I packed my Versace duffel bag and headed to Portland,” Renteria says. “(Olguin) picked me up at the airport and drove me to Corvallis.”

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OSU assistant coach Cory Crooks calls Maximo Renteria “a gangster, a beast” because of his aggressive wrestling style (courtesy Allie Grant/OSU wrestling)

Renteria spent his first season with the Beavers focusing on straightening up his academics and lifestyle and developing his talents as a backup to Kaylor.

“He was really fortunate to be behind Brandon and see how he went about his business,” Pendleton says.

Kaylor went on to win the Pac-12 title that season, then serve as a volunteer assistant the next two seasons. He has become a role model, mentor and friend.

“I had no problem with being the guy who needs to fight for the spot, and Kaylor was an awesome wrestler,” Renteria says. “He was the best partner for me, and still is to this day. That first year (2023-24), he beat me in the wrestle-off. Props to him and the season he had. He is an awesome person aside from wrestling. I appreciate him. I thank him for everything.”

When OSU coaches told him they were bringing Renteria into the program, Kaylor wasn’t thrilled.

“I was hard-headed,” he says. “Any time the coaching staff brought in a guy at my weight, I was a hard ‘no thank you.’ As much as I love him now, to be honest, it was like, ‘We don’t need him. We got me.’ But as his teacher the last two years, I am like, ‘OK, that makes sense.’ ”

After Renteria got to campus, “I didn’t even want to wrestle Max,” Kaylor says. “I didn’t want to give him an opportunity to think he could take my spot. Once the coaching staff put it to me this way — ‘He will be a benefit to you; he will push you’ — I changed my mind. Looking back, I wish I had wrestled Max more because of how good he is.”

Renteria had only two varsity matches that season but won them both, pulling off one of the biggest upsets of the collegiate season when he knocked off Arizona State’s Richie Figueroa 9-5 in a dual meet. Four weeks later, Figueroa was an NCAA champion. Kaylor was out at the time with an injury, but Renteria says, “I had requested that match earlier that year.”

“Pendleton said something, probably jokingly, like, ‘Oh, you don’t want that smoke,’ ” Max says. “But after he said that, I wanted that match even more. I really did.”

But Max doesn’t make too much of the victory.

“A lot of people bring that up, but … but I’m someone who lives in the present,” he says. “I am focused on what is in front of me. I don’t look at that win like, ‘I beat somebody who won the NCAAs.’ I look at it like I just beat him that day.”

With Kaylor’s eligibility expired, Renteria was Oregon State’s regular at 125 last season, going 14-9 and winning the Pac-12 title. He won one match at the NCAA Championships before elimination, his two losses coming by scores of 10-8 and 7-6.

“There were times he wrestled as good as we have seen him this year,” Rhoden says. “That wasn’t at the NCAAs.”

“Going in, I said I was going to win (an NCAA title), and I ended up allowing my mental (frame of mind) take over and control the way I performed,” he says. “It wasn’t even about the wrestling.”

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This season, “it has been a much different Maximo,” Rhoden says.

“He has been one of our most consistent performers all season,” Pendleton says. “He has shown an openness to being coached. He is no longer taking any kind of perceived criticism as a negative, but as, ‘Hey, this is what you need to work on.’

“Last year, he got a bit defensive about things. He is a strong-willed person. He wanted to plow forward with the way he wants to do things. This year, he has been more open to constructive criticism. It has been a pleasure to see him mature and grow.”

The results have been striking. Four times, Renteria has been named Pac-12 Wrestler of the Week — the first Beaver ever to win the award that often in a season.

“He is athletically very gifted,” Pendleton says. “From a technical standpoint, he is solid in all three positions. He doesn’t have any glaring weaknesses. He can get to a leg. He is good defensively — really explosive on bottom and can put a tough ride on top.”

“He is one of the best hand-fighters in the country,” Rhoden says. “He gets off the bottom against everybody. At the NCAAs, you have to be able to ride somebody for a minute-plus, because the matches can be tight. He is an excellent finisher, getting to legs and scoring. He has been damn consistent. Last year, he had some matches where he let guys get to his legs. Not a lot of people have touched his legs this year.”

Kaylor admires Renteria’s tenacity.

“One of his best attributes is his persistence,” Kaylor says. “Coach (Cory) Crooks likes to say, ‘He is a gangster, a beast.’ Max knows when it is time to put a foot down, strap up and go forward. He likes to scrap. That is part of what makes him so tough. He is scared of nothing. He is a fighter. He likes to scrap. He doesn’t like to lose.”

During a recent practice session, an opponent scored a takedown on Renteria.

“He was so mad, he grabbed his partner by the headgear and said, ‘Let’s go again,’ ” Kaylor says. “And he proceeded to whip him and put a spanking on him for 15, 20 minutes until he felt like he was satisfied with his practice.”

Kaylor laughs.

“Max is a funny guy, and he can be a jokester,” he says. “But he means business.”

That has been apparent this season.

“We knew what we had in him,” says Engel, who says he still talks weekly with Renteria via phone. “Last year, he had some big wins, but you never knew which Maximo was going to show up. After the NCAA Tournament, we talked long and hard about doing everything right 24/7, 365 days of the year. You have to practice hard and have a great attitude. That is one thing he changed — being grateful for the opportunity. He is doing everything right now on a daily basis and believing he can be the best.”

Rhoden says it is impossible not to notice the change in Renteria in a number of ways.

“He has found discipline, an understanding of his role on the team as a leader,” Rhoden says. “He is coaching up young guys now. The transformation from his first two years to this year has been stark. Before, he was maybe a little more selfish or would stray a little bit. This year, he has been dialed in.

“You can see the change that has occurred in the young man. He is doing the right things socially and academically, how he rests and receives. He has a very strict regimen he takes this year in terms of supplement and diet. He has enjoyed the benefits of that. He has been healthy and high energy all season, which is hard to do.

“There are many indicators that we are working with a different Max than we have worked with in the past. That is exciting for all of us coaches.”

Perhaps none moreso than Kaylor, who wrestles Renteria in practice “at least two or three times” a week.

“Max had a lot of potential last year, a lot of upside,” Kaylor says. “It is no secret that Max’s biggest enemy has been himself. He beats himself up too much. He makes things bigger than they have to be. Once he is focused on what is in front of him, you see what he can do. Once he hones it in, he is a different cat.”

Kaylor says a turning point for Renteria was last year’s NCAA Tournament.

“He realized it is not as big or as scary as he thought,” Kaylor says. “After you finish his season, you have your life ahead of you to figure out what you want to do. Right now, he is taking it day by day.”

Renteria seems to have done plenty of introspection on the subject of, well, himself.

“I really like that I was able to recreate myself based on the people I have surrounded myself with,” he says. He mentions first his coaches and teammates. “I have great roommates, too,” he adds, including Olguin.

“The coaches have allowed me to figure things out and not be too demanding of things. I was able to cash in on the opportunity that they gave me. I took that and shaped it into something I want to look like later on in my life.”

A pause.

“I have different goals in mind now,” he says. “These goals are more attainable based on my way of living and the work ethic I am giving. The training, the lifestyle all adds up. If you don’t work hard, it will show in the competition. If you do, it will show, too. This year, it has shown quite a bit. I have altered my attitude into taking this last year to win. I want to win.”

Before the NCAA Tournament, there is the four-team Pac-12 Tournament, in which Renteria will be defending his title against wrestlers from Arkansas Little Rock, Cal Poly and Cal State Bakersfield. Renteria will be the top seed and Cal Poly’s Koda Holeman — whom he beat 13-6 in a dual meet — is the likely No. 2 seed. Is Holeman, ranked No. 21 nationally, his biggest concern?

“There is no concern at all,” Renteria says, not arrogantly, but confidently. “Where my mind is at for these matches is to widen the gap. Whatever the score was last time, I need to make it a bigger gap. I am going for a tech (fall) or a pin. I want more than I did last time.”

In all likelihood, Renteria will then take his talents to Cleveland for a final shot at the best in the country. Other than Bouzakis, he has met no top-10 wrestlers in his weight class this season.

“He should be at least thinking, ‘I am going to be an All-American,’ ” Rhoden says, which would mean placing in the top eight in his class.

By now, you know Renteria is shooting higher than that.

“This year, I have focused on allowing nothing to bother me or get ticked off about things,” he says. “I am ready. I can’t wait for that day to come.”

Another pause. A smile.

“But I am focused on right now — the practice we’re about to have,” he says. “And the NCAAs will eventually come.”

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Wrestling is Renteria’s thing for now, but he says some day he will turn to UFC fighting (courtesy Allie Grant/OSU wrestling)

Renteria already has a big win off the mat this year. He expects to graduate this term, with a major in new media communications. After that, he is not sure where freestyle wrestling will take him. He knows eventually he will take a shot at a UFC career.

“I have wanted to fight for a long time, since Ernesto showed me the fights on TV when I was younger,” he says. “I thought that was really cool. I look at it as an art.”

Pause. He looks serious, searching for a moment for words.

“Some people see art in paintings,” Max says. “I look at art as what God gave us, which is our bodies. Fighters are able to do crazy movements with their bodies.

“I really want to fight UFC. People say, ‘What about getting punched in the face?’ All that goes out the window and is not much of a concern when you are doing it, when you are in the ‘fight-or-flight mode.’ I chase that (fight) mode. A lot of people say they get really nervous. But the feeling is something you can harness and use to your advantage. I like that feeling. Fighting allows me to feel that way the most.”

And like in wrestling, Renteria will set his UFC goals high.

“I actually do think,” he says, “that I can beat the best guys.”

If that doesn’t happen?

“I can go right into my life and start living the real world,” he says. “I have put some thought into that. Fighting is a chaotic sport — very unpredictable. You have to have a backup plan. As of now, my backup plan is to prevent that from happening. I want to chase my goal.”

Pendleton chuckles softly when I read him that quote.

“Max has a passion for the high-performance sports and learning what his body is capable of — how he treats his body and how his body reacts to it,” the OSU coach says. “He has made no secret about his (UFC) goals. I think he is going to be phenomenal. But he has another month of being a college wrestler before he puts that to bed.”

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