Crespi’s First-Class Coach : Celt Staff Gets Some Election-Year Help From a Kennedy as Former USC Fullback Pola Takes White Under His Wing

Crespi High Coach Bill Redell is banking that his running backs--especially Russell White--will carry the team this fall. So it was with some interest that he sought a loan in a bank lobby earlier this summer.

Redell ran into former USC fullback Kennedy Pola at a bank and asked him if he could help his team as a volunteer assistant. Talk about your full-service banks.

For Pola, and Redell, the request could not have come at a better time.

“I would have started calling coaches because I wanted to get back in coaching,” said Pola, who coached part time at Crespi in 1986 when the Celts won the Southern Section Big Five Conference championship.

“He has a great way with kids,” Redell said.

Redell is especially hopeful Pola will have a great way with White, a two-time Southern Section 5-A Division Player of the Year.

“He’s amazing,” Pola said. “But Russell is so elusive, he won’t give you that first hit. Sometimes it’s like his hips are on one side of the field and his shoulders are on the other side.

“He’s on a different level, it’s like he’s a Porsche and everyone else is a Volkswagen. He has to strive to reach his potential and not be satisfied.”

Pola knows something about potential. He earned All-American honors as a linebacker at Mater Dei High in Santa Ana, but at USC he moved to the other side of the line and started at fullback. It was a critical, if somewhat anonymous, job.

“Being a fullback, I learned a lot about blocking and the techniques,” he said. “Coach (John) Robinson used to tell me, ‘You’re not going to get anything on your first carry, on your second you might get an inch.’ ”

In his junior and senior years, the 6-foot, 1-inch, 265-pound Pola was in on every Trojan offensive play, including those in a Rose Bowl win over Ohio State his junior year.

Pola, who now works as a home builder, lives with his newlywed in Westlake Village.

At Crespi, Pola will try to build running backs and linebackers, and the players are already responding.

“He’s great. Maybe because he just got out of the game,” senior linebacker Quinn Fauria said. “He knows a lot and I enjoy working with him. Better coaches make better players.”

Pola is not likely to make any major philosophical changes in Redell’s program. Instead, he will concentrate on fundamentals.

“I’m trying to teach the techniques, even little things like grabbing and swinging someone by the shoulder pads on a block,” Pola said. “But I’m also trying to teach techniques on using energy. In high school, it always goes back to the stronger man wins. I’m trying to change that.

“In high school you just try to hit the guy harder. But if you can react faster and gather yourself, you can win the battle.”

Pola also is working with the basic zone defense Crespi has traditionally played, though he will be trying to change perceptions more than defensive alignments with that project.

“Everybody thinks that you just drop into a zone, but quarterbacks don’t throw to zones, they throw to people,” he said. “I have to convince them to creep over and get somebody.”

The best coaching in the world cannot solve every problem, though, and there is one that worries Pola.

“Depth,” he said. “We’re just not that deep. But the athletes we do have can be very good, and we’re never out of it.”

Of course, that puts a lot more emphasis on physical conditioning. But the key there is not necessarily for the players to bulk up but rather to retain what they have.

“You can’t take them to the training table and stuff food down their throats,” Pola said.

In 1986, in Pola’s first half-season stint with Crespi, he arrived too late to have much input on molding the team. This time around, he has developed enough of a relationship with the players and coaches to be an integral part of the team.

“Coach Redell gives me the freedom to try with this group,” Pola said.

And he hopes to make the most of that freedom. A good performance may help lead to a head coaching position someday, a goal of Pola’s.

“I would love to,” Pola said of being at the helm of a program. “I might have the mental background to fit with these kids.”