Making the Most of a Second Chance
Dismissed for Fighting at Temple, Costa Now Lays Hits on Terps' Opponents

By Marc Carig
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, December 29, 2006

After the night he thought he lost everything, Rick Costa made the 10-minute walk from his grungy Philadelphia apartment to the Temple University football complex.

He wanted to explain to any coach who would listen that what he did was an accident. He wanted to say that he didn't mean to head-butt the police officer who put him into a full nelson, that the brawl started because he was coming to the defense of a friend.

Costa, now a redshirt sophomore defensive end and linebacker at Maryland, made the walk for five straight days. Each time, he said, he strapped headphones to his ears, looked down and walked past the homeless people, the buildings with broken windows and the trash, all the while reciting the rosary his mother had given him. Everything, he remembers, was gray.

He wasn't charged for his role in the fight or for his action against the police officer. He wasn't arrested. But he didn't know what would happen with his full football scholarship.

"It felt like torture," he said.

Two years feels like a long time ago to Costa. Some of the memories, he said, are becoming cloudy. But the recollections and lessons of the night that changed everything for him remain sharp.

"I came as close as you can come to being in jail and losing the respect of everybody I loved," he said.

Costa came to Temple in 2004 from Moorestown, N.J., where he starred as an all-state linebacker, safety and wide receiver at Holy Cross High School. By the following year, Costa played well enough to earn a starting linebacker spot coming out of spring football, despite separating his left shoulder in the process.

But two weeks later, in April 2005, he threw away his chance by jumping into a fight that he says he wasn't looking for. Costa was playing video games with friends at his apartment when several acquaintances dropped in. A visitor confronted one of Costa's friends. The two had a history. Tempers flared and an exchange of words quickly escalated into a brawl.

"I had no intent on doing anything more than helping my friend," Costa said.

He said the head-butt came as a reaction to being put in a full nelson, which he said sent a surge of pain into his injured shoulder. But Costa had done the inexcusable, and the Temple coaches pulled his scholarship.

"It was probably the best thing to happen for him," his brother Phil said.

From there, Costa returned to New Jersey, where he went to his mother, broke down and cried. "Just let me find a place that's right," he said he thought as he clutched the rosary.

Despite kicking him off the team, Temple Coach Bobby Wallace promised Costa's parents he would put in a good word for their son, who wanted to transfer to Maryland to join Phil, a redshirt freshman center for the Terrapins.

At the behest of Costa's parents, Wallace called Maryland Coach Ralph Friedgen with a second-chance proposition.

"Ralph, I've got a kid here," Friedgen remembered Wallace saying. "You're going to have his brother. The parents called me and asked if I would call you. If he's not the best football player I've got, he's close to it."

Friedgen had grown friendly with the parents while recruiting Phil Costa.

He liked Phil and invited Rick to College Park. With a bum shoulder and a bad reputation, Costa sat down in Friedgen's office and asked the coach for a shot.

His parents came to offer support. Friedgen allowed Costa to walk on the team. If things worked out, he told him, maybe he could earn a scholarship. But Friedgen laid out a simple one-strike plan.

One mistake, one incident, and Costa was done.

"I was going to go through a year of seeing if he could behave himself," Friedgen said. "I just didn't need another problem. And if he could show he could do it on the field, and he stayed out of trouble, and did well academically, that I had a scholarship I could put him on."

Costa said he is grateful for the chance, though the tough words spoken in that meeting with Friedgen still stick in his mind today. "It just made me feel a little less inside," Costa said.

Earning a Spot

Costa's reputation as a hitter started growing shortly after he joined the program that summer. He was a walk-on and a stranger to everybody but his younger brother Phil. It was just the way Rick wanted it.

"When he first got here, he didn't say a word to anybody, probably the first three months," Phil Costa said. "People didn't know what was going through his head."

Costa viewed practices the way prospects treat combines. Each hit he made caught a coach's attention, or so he hoped. But he couldn't afford to take a chance, so he went full speed, turning his chiseled 6-foot, 246-pound frame into a wrecking ball. The mentality carried him throughout his first year at College Park.

"I told myself before I came to camp, I'm not going to talk to anyone," Costa said. "I'm not going to be anybody's friend. I'm just going to make sure that every time someone ran an iso [isolation play], every time someone comes to block, I'm just going to hit them as hard as I can with everything I had."

During one workout, coaches asked Costa to take on former Terrapins fullback Ricardo Dickerson. When he set up to throw a block, Costa accelerated to full speed to challenge it. Costa barreled into Dickerson, and an unforgettable sound rang through the air.

"It sounded liked a damned gunshot," Terrapins safety Christian Varner said.

The loud crack was Dickerson's shoulder popping out of its socket, prompting the question, "Who the hell was that?"

Soon after that hit, Varner walked into the team's training room, where he discovered a line of three teammates, each nursing shoulder injuries. He asked all three the same question and each time he received the same response.

"What happened to you?"

"Rick hit me."

Costa later delivered the season-ending hit that resulted in a torn ACL for offensive lineman Stephon Heyer.

A few weeks later, Varner got his personal introduction. Varner lined up to return a punt during practice when he saw Costa coming straight for him.

"I thought he was going to stop," Varner said. Instead, Costa bulldozed Varner, rendering his right arm numb in what is still the worst stinger he's suffered in his career. Varner said he wasn't angry later that day when he put the question to Costa.

"Are you trying to kill somebody?"

"I'm just trying to get a job, man. I'm just trying to get a job."

The Turnaround

With each hit, Costa felt as if he recaptured a piece of his lost identity. Eventually, he gained the attention of coaches but the effort came with a price. He injured the same shoulder he had hurt while at Temple. Friedgen convinced Costa to undergo surgery in October 2005, and he missed all of winter conditioning and some of spring ball.

"I felt like I lost my shot," Costa said.

Nevertheless, Costa's intensity in rehabilitation matched his effort in the classroom. He was nearing the end of his first year at Maryland when he started hearing teammates chatter about which walk-ons would get scholarships. Then, he prayed. At about 8 p.m. on a Sunday during two-a-days, Friedgen summoned Costa to his office. Costa figured that Friedgen was going to get mad at him for something he did at practice, and he was right.

But Friedgen also wanted to tell Costa something more important. As promised, Friedgen awarded the full scholarship that night to him, and Costa has rewarded the coach's faith since.

"I think you deserve it," Costa remembered Friedgen saying. "Don't let anything change."

Costa played in 11 of 12 Maryland games this season at defensive end, linebacker and on special teams. But he partially dislocated his right shoulder while making a hit against North Carolina State. While Costa has been able to play, he hasn't been as effective since. Friedgen said Costa may need offseason surgery.

He finished the regular season with 12 tackles, half a sack and two fumble recoveries. Off the field, Costa maintains a GPA above 3.0.

"He has been no problem to me," Friedgen said. "He does what he's supposed to do. If anything, he overdoes what he's supposed to do."

His effort helped Maryland to an 8-4 record and a spot in tonight's Champs Sports Bowl against Purdue in Orlando.

"I was so much more than lucky to go through losing a scholarship, then to go to 10-times a better situation," Costa said. "What more could I have asked?"