Heating Up in Arizona : Former Kennedy High Standout Carter Making Quick Impression as Wildcats’ Freshman Tailback

Ontiwaun Carter shed his Arizona helmet and walked across Washington’s Husky Stadium football field toward the locker-room tunnel. His unflappable confidence was intact despite the beating his football team had just taken.

Arizona was pushed through a meat grinder Saturday, absorbing a 54-0 thrashing by Washington. The Wildcats, an option team facing the nation’s top run defense, were held to 30 yards rushing and committed seven turnovers. Washington, ranked No. 3 in the country in The Associated Press poll, used 80 players--10 of whom are walk-ons.

Carter, a freshman tailback from Kennedy High, flashed a disarming smile. He recalled his favorite run of the game. It came in the fourth quarter, so the memory was fresh.

“Once I hit the seam, I cut back,” he said. “I was gone.”

Well, not exactly gone. Actually, Carter took a pitch on the Arizona five-yard line, ran left, cut back to the middle, smacked into a referee and was gang-tackled 12 yards downfield. Carter said he could have broken away had he not collided with the referee.

“That would have been my first college touchdown,” he said, shaking his head from side to side.

Not everyone agrees that the referee saved a touchdown.

“We still had four secondary backs who were pretty good brackets on the run,” said Jim Lambright, Washington’s defensive coordinator.

“He would have had to juke a couple of those guys in order to have broken it.”

There will be more chances for Carter, a confessed “young pup” in the Arizona system, a guy who has turned head after head in Tucson, many of which are attached to the bodies of frustrated defenders who can only watch as he zips past. He started against Washington and wound with 19 of Arizona’s 30 rushing yards. Earlier, he gained 110 yards in a 45-21 victory over Cal State Long Beach.

Big things are expected of Carter, who has 141 yards in 29 carries in three games. He was regarded as a top major-college prospect at Kennedy, where he gained 1,538 yards as a senior and set the school’s career-rushing mark (4,274 yards) in three seasons.

At 5-feet-11 and 170 pounds, Carter is light, but he can bench-press more than twice his weight. He also has shown he can take a hit. According to Kennedy Coach Bob Francola, roughly 3,000 of Carter’s career yards came on runs between the tackles.

“We’ve got film of him knocking people out,” he said.

Durable, but hardly indestructible, Carter paid a price for his slight build. He sat out at least one game each season because of an injury.

“Some kids are like Chevys or Hudsons,” Francola said. “Big, kinda slow, but they never need repairs. ‘Twan is like a Porsche. He’s so fast. Sometimes you have to take a Porsche to the shop.”

On his first day of practice under the Arizona sun, this sports car overheated. During Kennedy drills, Carter’s feet were a blur; at Arizona, his world was.

“I was thinking, ‘You’re in college, you’ve got to do everything full speed.’ The heat just got to me,” he said. “I was doing one backpedaling drill. I started seeing little stars and I was out.”

Carter was revived with an ice pack and an ammonia capsule.

“Now I’m getting adjusted to the heat,” he said.

That’s good, because the heat is on at Arizona. The 2-3 Wildcats are banged up and easily could slip out of the Pacific 10 Conference race.

Asked after the Washington game whether Carter represents the future of his team, Arizona Coach Dick Tomey sounded irritated.

“We need to quit thinking about our future and think about now,” he said. “We’ve got a lot of freshmen playing and so on, but we need to think about right now. We can’t get into that future business.”

Ontiwaun’s father, Dwight Carter, cannot help but look at the future. He is confident that his son is bound for one place.

“The NFL,” said Carter, who watched last Saturday’s game from his living room in Sylmar. “Strictly the NFL. He just loves football. He eats football. He thinks about it all the time.”

Like the end zone on Carter’s would-be touchdown run in Husky Stadium, a pro career is seemingly miles away. Ontiwaun knows this. His role is different in college. Instead of running up the gut, he goes in motion and often lines up in the slot.

“I had to get used to a lot more than just running,” he said. “I had to know my pass routes, blocking schemes, and that kind of knocked me down a lot.”

Coaches liked what they saw in Carter, who made a brisk ascent up the depth chart. He passed Lamont Lovett, a sophomore from Franklin High who was the No. 1 tailback last spring.

“Ontiwaun has more capability to make people miss than Lamont,” Tomey said.

By Carter’s reckoning, a couple of Pac-10 schools missed big when they failed to land him out of high school. Washington and USC showed interest in him but backed off when he did not pass his Scholastic Aptitude Test.

“Washington didn’t show that they had enough confidence in me passing the SAT. That kind of turned me off,” he said. “Arizona did.”

Carter passed with a score of 720 on his fourth attempt.

“I was telling him, ‘You’re going to pass it,’ ” his father said. “Arizona was really the only school that had confidence in him.”

Besides, Washington had focused its attention on tailback Napoleon Kaufman, a lightning bolt from Lompoc High considered one of the top two high school football players in the nation last season by SuperPrep magazine.

The Huskies landed Kaufman and Leon Neal, the No. 2 back on their wish list.

Washington’s coaching staff believed Carter was a good prospect but rated both Kaufman and Neal ahead of him.

“Napoleon Kaufman was always the No. 1 choice for us,” Washington Coach Don James said. “We liked (Carter). We thought he was a good player. I think he can play in this league.”

Carter has even higher expectations of himself: “Right now I’m still a pup. People really don’t know what I can do. In due time, it’s going to show.”