Bible Bowl: It Will Be a Battle on the Ground and in the Air:

Tim Feirfeil gravitated to playing receiver in his formative years out of necessity. Close friend Peter Dirksen needed someone to throw to and older brother Brian and his cronies needed someone to knock around in neighborhood pickup games.

Either way, Feirfeil grew accustomed to being a target on the football field.

“I used to put on [Brian’s] pads and play against him and his friends,” Feirfeil recalled. “They would just rock us.”

Dirksen, though, remembers Feirfeil running circles around the older kids to catch his passes.

“Tim was always open and he’d always beat them deep,” Dirksen said. “He caught everything.”

Not much has changed. Dirksen and Feirfeil are now seniors at L.A. Baptist High, giving the Knights one of the region’s most prolific pass-catch combinations.

Feirfeil still catches everything thrown his way. The difference this season is that the sure-handed, quick-footed wideout is doing more running with the ball after he catches it.

After a summer of working on his speed, Feirfeil (pronounced FAR-file) has shown a knack for turning short completions into long gains as well as beating defenders on deep routes.

His game-breaking skills will be a focal point for Village Christian when pass-happy L.A. Baptist (4-1) plays the run-oriented Crusaders (4-1) in an Alpha League opener at 7:30 tonight at Kennedy High, an annual meeting of rivals known as the “Bible Bowl.”

“We want to keep the ball as long as we can and keep Dirksen and Feirfeil off the field,” Village Christian Coach Mike Plaisance said.

Numbers don’t lie. In Feirfeil’s case, they demonstrate that a modestly sized receiver (5 feet 10, 170 pounds) can perform huge feats. Through five games, he has 28 catches for a region-leading 716 yards and an untouchable 25.6-yard average. Of his eight touchdown receptions, the shortest is 37 yards. Four have covered 60 yards or more.

“He’s real smart once he catches the ball,” L.A. Baptist Coach Mark Bates said of Feirfeil. “He reads downfield blocks and he tries to set up those guys to gain more yards.”

Dirksen, an All-Southern Section quarterback, concurs.

“He’s smart,” Dirksen said of his favorite receiver. “That’s why he’s always getting open. He’s really quick and he has better hands than anyone I’ve ever thrown with. . . . It seems like every time he catches it, it’s a first down, if not more.”

Last week, it was more. Feirfeil’s first two catches against Brethern Christian went for 37- and 70-yard touchdowns in the first quarter of an eventual 21-14 Knight victory. He finished with six catches for 191 yards, the fifth consecutive game he had more than 100 yards in receptions and scored at least a touchdown.

Fillmore Coach Norm Andersen had a head-turning encounter with Feirfeil in L.A. Baptist’s 47-21 victory over the Flashes two weeks ago.

“He ran by us like a blur,” Andersen said.

Feirfeil’s elusiveness was most noticeable on a screen pass that he turned into a 75-yard touchdown.

“I was impressed with him after the catch,” Andersen said. “He really gets the ball up field. He’s an exciting player. He looked like Jim Thorpe against us. We couldn’t tackle him to save our souls.”

Andersen--who was UCLA’s leading receiver in 1974-75 and served two stints as a Bruin assistant, working with such high-profile receivers as J.J. Stokes and Kevin Jordan--says Feirfeil has the talent to play college football, even though he doesn’t measure up physically in the eyes of major schools.

“Sometimes big schools only want to know how big and how fast you are,” Andersen said. “But a kid who can catch the ball like that, he can find a place to play.”

Andersen said Feirfeil reminds him of former UCLA receiver Cormac Carney, who wasn’t highly recruited out of St. Anthony High in Long Beach but became only the third Bruin to lead the team in receptions for three seasons (1980-82).

“Not many people thought [Carney] was good enough when he came out of high school,” Andersen said. “He ended up the all-time leading receiver at UCLA because he was smart and worked hard. I don’t know if [Feirfeil] is a Cormac Carney, but there were some similarities when he was running past me on the sidelines.”

Bates said recruiting interest in Feirfeil has been scant, with smaller colleges such as UC Davis and Northern Colorado making inquiries. But that doesn’t lower Bates’ opinion of his top pass catcher.

“We feel like he’s one of the best receivers in the Valley,” he said. “We’re not just basing that on his stats, but on his performances this summer when we went up against some of the better schools in the Valley. We feel like he can play anywhere.”

Dirksen, who has passed for 1,339 yards and 11 touchdowns, says he wouldn’t trade Feirfeil for any other receiver in the region based on what he saw in summer passing-league games.

“Against Taft or whoever, it didn’t matter, he would always get open and always catch it,” Dirksen said. “Nobody could guard him.”

Feirfeil modestly gives Dirksen, his buddy since third grade, most of the credit for his success.

“It’s pretty easy when you have the best quarterback in the Valley,” he said. “He puts it right there every time.”

Feirfeil is the third member of his family to play football at L.A. Baptist, following his father, Bruce, and brother Brian, a Knight receiver from 1993-95. Feirfeil’s father and mother, Pam, met while they were L.A. Baptist students and his sister, Kelly, is a freshman expected to contend for a spot on the Knight varsity softball team.

With that kind of sports background, it’s not surprising that Feirfeil earned All-Southern Section honors in two sports as a junior. He was named All-Division XI in football after catching 52 passes for 871 yards and four touchdowns, and he was All-Division V in baseball after a season in which he was the Knights’ top pitcher and an outfielder.

But the intensity of football makes it his first love. Asked what he would like to study in college, he half-jokingly said, “football.”

Feirfeil and his teammates have studied plenty of game film this season, but it hasn’t been pleasant. Before each game, the Knights watch a video of last year’s 42-41 upset loss to Serrano in the first round of the playoffs.

“To remind us of how bad we felt,” Feirfeil explained.

Feirfeil says L.A. Baptist is on a mission this season. Winning a Southern Section title is the goal of everyone on the team.

Yet he cautions against looking too far ahead, what with the team’s archrival waiting to gain the upper hand in the league race tonight.

“We’ve got to get past Village [Christian] first,” he said.

You know Feirfeil will do his part. After all, getting past people is his specialty.