Opening Salvo Signals an Explosive Performance : Football: Poly’s Pledger bursts into spotlight after moving out of the shadow of former teammate Campbell.

It did not take long last Friday for Poly High running back Jermaine Pledger to realize that he had embarked on the greatest game of his career.

Pledger’s initial carry against Grant netted 18 yards and set up a three-yard touchdown run by Ronald Botley.

“(On my) first carry, I had a long run, and from there I just knew there was going to be something good happening tonight,” Pledger said.

It was intuition. The Parrots won, 49-14, and Pledger rushed for a career-high 317 yards in 20 carries and scored on runs of 78, three, 19 and 66 yards. All that and he did not touch the ball in the fourth quarter.

“I didn’t believe them at first when they told me before halftime that I had 200 and something yards,” he said.

Pledger, a 5-foot-9, 170-pound senior, is a shy, modest athlete who has trouble accepting his status as one of the area’s top running backs. Perhaps, he defers too much to his mentors, Jonathan Campbell and Leon Gable.

Campbell, Pledger’s running mate last year who currently plays for Cal State Northridge, rushed for 2,091 yards and scored 31 touchdowns in 1990 when he was named the City Section 3-A Division player of the year.

Gable, Pledger’s cousin, rushed for 1,777 yards and scored 24 touchdowns for North Hollywood last season.

Both Gable and Campbell attend most Poly games, cheering for their buddy and giving him a pointer or two from the sidelines.

Pledger intends to play with Gable next year at Glendale College. For motivation before every game, Pledger watches videotapes of Gable’s runs.

“Watching (Gable) run excites me,” Pledger said. “It just turns me on, lights me up, gets me amped.”

Pledger’s runs over the past two seasons have been electric. Pledger carried the ball only one-third as often as Campbell last year but maintained a better than 8.3 yards-a-carry average throughout his first year of high school football. He gained 903 yards in 109 carries and finished eighth among the region’s City rushers.

Pledger already has surpassed last year’s yardage total after seven games, and his per-carry average has slipped only two-tenths of a yard. He currently is the region’s second-leading rusher among area City players with 955 yards in 118 carries. Only Kennedy’s Elijah Raphael (1,017 yards in 170 carries) has rushed for more yards.

Poly Coach Fred Cuccia said he could not ask for a more explosive, more coachable running back than Pledger.

“He has the explosiveness and the ability to break one every time he touches the ball,” he said. “Jermaine is the type of person that when you tell him what he’s doing wrong, he accepts it and improves on it.”

Pledger has tried to apply the same work ethic to his studies. As a sophomore, he was academically ineligible to play football, prompting him to think more seriously about his future.

“I don’t want to be like a bum when I grow up, so I started working hard and thinking about (school),” he said.

Pledger, who once ran around with what he calls bad influences, would like to work as a parole officer to “help teen-agers stay out of trouble and off the street.”

Cuccia has become a surrogate father of sorts for Pledger, who has not lived with his father since infancy.

Pledger grew up without a male role model in the house and he admits that he felt the loss. However, he hopes to turn the loss into a positive.

“I don’t want to do like my father did, I want to do better than that,” he said.