Kiesau Emerges From Rucker’s Shadow : Glendale Quarterback Discovers There’s More to Position Than Handing Off

As a quarterback, Eric Kiesau appeared doomed to a career of being little more than a middleman, necessary only because having the center snap the ball directly to the running back is a bit awkward.

For two years at Glendale High, Kiesau’s job went something like this:

--Get ball from center. Turn to left. Give ball to Pathon Rucker.

--Get ball from center. Turn to right. Give ball to Pathon Rucker.

--Get ball from center. Pretend to give ball to someone else. Give ball to Pathon Rucker.

Kiesau could have been replaced by a Lazy Susan serving tray.

Rucker was the offense at Glendale High. As a junior in 1990, he led the Southern Section in scoring with 31 touchdowns in 10 games and gained 1,878 yards in 229 carries.

And nearly every one of Glendale’s rushing plays began with Kiesau. Get the ball. Hand it to Rucker.

“It was frustrating at times,” said Kiesau, who passed for 807 yards as a senior in 1990 and 864 yards the year before.

But in 1991, Kiesau began playing football at Glendale College. And Coach John Cicuto showed Kiesau a remarkable thing. You take the ball from the center, just like always, but then--and get this!--you don’t hand it to someone else. Instead, you switch the ball into your right hand, cock your arm back over your head and then throw it , just like throwing a rock into a pond. The idea is to throw it to a teammate running downfield.

It’s called the pass . Kiesau really liked it.

This year, as a sophomore at Glendale College, Kiesau has thrown the football 154 times. Ninety-eight of those passes have been caught by teammates and only two by a defensive player. Sixteen of the passes have gone for touchdowns.

And all of a sudden, this game of football is really a riot for Kiesau.

“I’d been waiting for this for a long time,” said Kiesau, 19, who leads Glendale (8-1) into its biggest game of the season tonight against Moorpark College (8-0-1) in a showdown for the Western State Conference Northern Division championship.

“At Glendale High it was strictly a running offense. And we ran most of the time here last year. But now we have a balanced attack with equal amounts of running and passing. I’m only throwing 15 times a game, but the receivers are fantastic. It’s just been a lot of fun.”

The conversion came slowly for Kiesau. The reason, according to Cicuto, was an obvious one. When he showed up at Glendale College a year and a half ago, Kiesau had a dead fish for an arm.

“At Glendale High he handed the ball to Pathon, and that was about it,” Cicuto said. “As a freshman for us he showed great leadership ability. He could keep the offense confident and calm during a game. Even as a freshman, the kids felt good with him in the game.

“But the physical part of the game, well, his arm was real weak last year.”

The rest of him wasn’t about to lift a car off a shrieking pedestrian, either. A year ago, Kiesau was 5-10 and weighed just 150 pounds. He decided that for his final season at Glendale, with the encouragement from Cicuto to start throwing the ball once in a while, he would bulk up.

He now weighs 168 pounds. It has made a great difference.

“The guy has come a tremendously long way since last year,” Cicuto said. “He’s still not a real big kid, but his arm has gotten so much stronger through a weightlifting program in the off-season. He has worked so hard to make himself better. He’s still not a deep threat. He just doesn’t have that kind of arm. But in the short and intermediate passing game, he is terrific. The ball gets there in a hurry.”

And the offense has followed Kiesau’s lead. Glendale has outscored its opponents this season by a whopping, 375-102, including a 75-0 blitz of Compton College on Nov. 7 in which Kiesau passed for 147 yards and four touchdowns in the first half.

He still hands off quite often to Rucker, who has followed Kiesau to Glendale College and is the team’s leading rusher with 817 yards and 13 touchdowns. But Kiesau’s 1,619 passing yards put him in second place among WSC quarterbacks.

Cicuto hopes the blend of run and pass that Kiesau has brought to the team this year will keep powerful Moorpark, which boasts the top junior college defense in the state, off balance.

“Eric and the rest of the team worked so hard in the last nine weeks,” Cicuto said. “(Tonight) we get a real good football team. We haven’t played a team as big and physical as Moorpark, so now we get to see exactly how good we are.

“But our offense can do the job. Our passing game with Eric helps the run so much. If we can show some success throwing, then they can’t squeeze us at the line with nine guys and overload the run.”

There will not, Cicuto said, be any Glendale bombs.

“The best part of Eric’s game is that he plays within his limitations,” Cicuto said. “He’s able to read defenses so well and adjust to them and he doesn’t have that ego that makes him want to throw the home run ball. With Eric, we know he’s not going to get off the 60-yard pass.

“But our receivers have consistently gotten open underneath the coverage all season, and Eric has consistently gotten the ball to them with nice, hard passes. He never, ever hurts this team with a bad pass.”

Heavy praise for a guy who until recently hardly knew what a pass was.

“I’d love to be one of those big guys who stand in the pocket and throw the ball 30 times a game,” he said. “All quarterbacks think that way. But I’m not.

“But I’m doing it another way, and we’re winning. And there’s nothing as nice as winning.”