KANSAS CITY, Mo. – The Avila University Department of Athletics is excited to announce that interim head coach Eric Mateo has been promoted to the role of Avila's head men's wrestling coach, effective immediately.
"From the first time I met Eric, he had a confidence about him. He was a standout wrestler, and I could tell he knew what he was talking about and is dedicated to the sport of wrestling," Avila University Director of Athletics Shawn Summe said. "I love his dedication and the way he came in this last year as an assistant, he did a great job of immersing himself in the program and Avila."
"I'm very grateful and thankful," Mateo said. "I'm thankful to our AD Shawn Summe, and all the folks in the hiring process that have trusted me to lead this program. Gratitude is what I preach to our athletes on a daily basis, so I'm just grateful to be able to pursue this passion, grateful for the trust that the people have put in to me. These young men have their dreams, and I'm at the helm of those dreams, so I'm thankful for that trust."
A native of St. Robert, Missouri, Mateo was a standout wrestler at Waynesville High School, winning the Missouri Class Four state championship and taking fourth at Greco Junior Nationals in 2010. Mateo went on to wrestle at Central Missouri from 2010 to 2014, and qualified for the NCAA-II Championship as a redshirt sophomore in 2013.
After graduating from UCM in 2015 with a degree in safety management, Mateo most recently served as an assistant wrestling coach at Olathe South from 2015 to 2022 before joining Avila as an assistant coach under head coach Graham Karwath last summer. In Mateo's first season, Avila finished as KCAC runners-up, and the Eagles had two conference champions (Daryus Webb and Karter Brink) and three national qualifiers (Brink, Webb and Logan Johnson) in just the second season in the team's history.
"Last year he jumped right in, he really from a technical side did a lot with our wrestlers, helping make them better wrestlers just from his experience as a college wrestler himself. He was right there with them, during practices and meets, he had a very good relationship and was good at coaching up our wrestlers," said Summe. "Eric's background as a wrestler speaks for itself, as does the experience he gained coaching at Olathe South. He's taught, he's coached, he's been an instructor - he's spent time crafting his trade."
Mateo recognizes that he's walked an "unconventional" path towards becoming a college head coach, but the many steps he's taken on that path have now led him to becoming the head coach at Avila – and he's ready to seize that opportunity.
"I've been pursuing this dream subconsciously maybe, not directly, for a while," Mateo said. "I'm just thankful to my family - my fiancée Alyssa and my two girls - for their full support and for understanding how much I love wrestling and how much it means to me, and how much it's done for me in my life. I'm thankful for their support. My brother reminded me I need to congratulate myself, because this is what you've always wanted, maybe you didn't know this was what you've always wanted, but now you've got it, so now the real work begins - but it's OK to celebrate first. Now that it's official that I'm the head coach it's just back to daily business, working on getting the guys better at wrestling, become better human beings, and trying to bring in quality individuals to the university and the wrestling program. I feel like I'm not skipping a beat, but it feels good to have it official."
Mateo now officially becomes the second head coach in program history, following the departure of Karwath, the program's founder, to Central Methodist earlier this summary. With the transition in personnel also comes a transition in structure: instead of operating as one program – Avila Wrestling – Avila will now feature two separate but coexisting men's and women's wrestling teams underneath the general Avila Wrestling umbrella, and both programs will retain their own head coach, with Mateo at the helm of the men's side. Wrestling at Avila will now function more like the soccer or basketball programs do, with two separate teams that will still work together to schedule matches, practices and travel, but will be able to provide more specialized coaching to the individual athletes and fashion their own specific team identities. More details will be announced later this month.
"I first got to meet Eric around this time last year, and we get along pretty dang well," said Zach Revier, who has served as associate head coach for the wrestling program over the past year. "We work well together, we think a lot alike, we're both super motivated and hard-working, we're good at bouncing ideas off each other, and we both have enough humility that we don't have issues with overstepping the other. We respect and trust each other enough to know that even if we don't see eye to eye on something it doesn't pay for us to argue or debate it. We ultimately decide together what works the best not only for an individual team, but collectively for the wrestling program at Avila University."
As he enters year one and the team enters year three, Mateo says his chief goals are for the team to sport a collective 3.5 GPA and have 100 percent of the roster attend 100 percent of their classes. In the room he'll continue to build a new foundation and foster a team culture, while the team works towards developing the first All-Americans and the first national champions in program history – Mateo pitches to all recruits and incomers that ablity to be a trailblazer and history-maker, accomplishing things that have never been achieved at Avila.
Something else Mateo instills in his athletes is the idea of gratitude. It's a core characteristic he built when he first started wrestling as a way to channel his energy and emotion as a teenager in Missouri, and one he's continued to cultivate as he begins to embark on his first voyage as a college head coach.
"I've known this all along, but there's more to life than wrestling," Mateo said. This is a game we play. It's a beautiful game and it can be a cruel game. It can do so much for you, but there's more to life. Everyone one day will hang their shoes up and never step on a mat again, so [you need to] be grateful for every minute you have on a wrestling mat. My goal is to develop quality human beings: good brothers, good sons, good husbands and fathers, if that's what they want - good, positive contributors to society."
Mateo's first season as Avila's head coach officially begins this week, with the 2023-24 men's wrestling season slated to begin in October. For further details and information about this story, and about all of Avila's 14 varsity athletic programs, contact Sports Information Director Tim Hackett.
