Chewing Up the Opposition : Northridge Midfielder Piri Sports Voracious Appetite for Food and Scoring Goals

The eggs were history. So were the bacon and the orange juice. All that remained was a rapidly dwindling stack of king-sized pancakes.

Scott Piri’s appetite and consumption belied his physical appearance. The upholstered restaurant booth in which he sat looked as if it would swallow up the blond, blue-eyed Piri at any moment.

“I’ve always eaten a lot of food,” Piri said between bites. “But I guess it’s my metabolism or something. I just can’t gain any weight.”

The 5-foot, 6-inch Piri tips the scales at a wispy 130 pounds.

But physical appearances notwithstanding, Piri weighs heavy on the minds of the sweepers and stoppers assigned to mark the Cal State Northridge midfielder.

Long before Oprah reveled in the joys of liquid protein, Piri was losing heavy-handed defenders by feeding them a steady diet of fast cuts and fluid moves. This season, the redshirt freshman from Burroughs High in Ridgecrest led the Matadors in scoring with 11 goals and 5 assists.

Piri has been the brightest newcomer on a team dominated by freshmen. He is hungering for a national championship and hopes to take another step toward it tonight when the Matadors, ranked 12th in Division II, meet third-ranked Seattle Pacific in the Western regional final in Seattle. The winner advances to the Final Four in December.

“Scott’s quick, not fast,” Northridge Coach Marwan Ass’ad said. “The reason it looks like he moves fast is he has no upper body. But part of getting from point A to point B is how much you want to get there.”

Piri lacks for neither desire nor endurance. Both traits, he said, are necessities when you’re a soccer player born without even average size.

“I could never really play the physical game,” Piri said. “So, I figured if I was in good shape, I could just keep running and people wouldn’t be able to keep up with me.”

To increase his stamina, Piri stopped gulping soft drinks and eating candy a few years ago because he thought they were slowing him.

“His grandma couldn’t get him to eat Christmas candy,” said Piri’s father, John. “She thought something was wrong with him.”

Piri drew some bemused looks when he ran the annual Ridgecrest Over-the-Hill 10-mile run once while dribbling a soccer ball. And Northridge players were anything but enchanted when Piri’s off-season training regimen helped him blow their doors off in the team’s annual 2-mile run that marks the start of fall workouts.

“I didn’t want to sit on the bench after sitting out last year,” Piri said. “I figured if I was in the best shape I could be in, it would allow me to learn more things because I could concentrate longer without getting tired.”

Piri honed his ability while growing up in Ridgecrest, a town of 27,000 in the northern Mojave Desert, about 2 1/2 hours from Northridge by way of Interstate 14.

Ridgecrest, which borders the China Lake Naval Weapons Center, is the second-largest city in Kern County, but it still has a small-town feel. There are only 4 stoplights and everyone knows everyone else in a city that bills itself as the “Key to New Horizons.”

For Piri, soccer was just that when his family moved from Tucson when he was in the third grade. He tried other sports, including football, but opted to get his kicks on the soccer field.

“The football coach liked my speed, but I was small,” he said. “In practice I’d be a running back. I’d be able to get through the holes, but if anybody just touched me, I’d fall over.”

Piri developed his superior technical skills by juggling--keeping the ball airborne between kicks, bumps and headers. In the fifth grade, Piri could juggle 50 times before the ball hit the ground. He once went 50 minutes--3,175 juggles--before dropping the ball as a freshman in high school.

“He was a little blond-haired skinny kind of kid who was all over the place,” said Northridge teammate Keith Martin, who played against Piri for Paraclete High. “He ran all over, controlled the ball well, dribbled very well and was always in the way like a little pest.”

Piri had 23 goals and 23 assists during his senior year for a Burroughs team that outscored opponents, 61-6. But a loss to Miraleste--on penalty kicks--in the Southern Section 3-A Division quarterfinals spoiled the season. Piri was selected All-Southern Section, but his feats drew little interest from college coaches who either questioned his size or had never seen him play.

Ass’ad was one of them.

He had coached Piri at the Two Rivers soccer camp in Lake Tahoe when Piri was 14 and told him to look him up when he was a senior in high school. Ass’ad then forgot about Piri until he showed up to watch a CSUN match 2 years ago.

Last season, Piri walked on to a senior-dominated team that finished second in the nation. Ass’ad recognized that if Piri played at all, it would be in a limited role. So, the day before Northridge’s season-opening exhibition against UCLA, Ass’ad decided to redshirt Piri.

Piri says now that it was the right decision, but he was upset upon hearing the news.

“It seemed to add to his desire,” said Piri’s mother, Carol. “It was like putting the carrot out in front of the horse.”

Many of the players on last year’s team, however, weren’t very receptive to Piri’s slick dribbling style, which they were forced to contend with during scrimmages. Defenders did not take kindly to Piri’s habit of controlling the ball at their expense.

“It becomes insulting as a defender when someone dribbles around you once or twice,” said Steve Lazarus, an all-conference sweeper last season. “Sometimes, you have to send a message.”

Lazarus sent one to Piri special delivery when he ground one of his cleats into Piri’s hip.

“The message got through,” said Lazarus, who moved to midfield this season and was selected California Collegiate Athletic Assn. Player of the Year.

This season, Piri is sharing a 2-bedroom apartment with Lazarus, Martin and Scott Hunter that features cabinets wallpapered with newspaper stories about Northridge soccer. Mini soccer and basketball goals decorate the living room and a plastic Ping-Pong net is on the dinette table.

“I think one of the reasons Scotty was so intense was that he wasn’t playing and there was always that pressure to perform well when he had a chance,” Lazarus said. “He’s proven himself this season and that’s taken some of the pressure off.”

Piri is looking forward to matching up against Seattle Pacific’s Chris McDonald, a 6-5, 205-pound stopper. He said he is also ready for the challenge of leading Northridge into Division I in 1990.

Like all previous obstacles, he plans to eat them up.