LITTLE QUESTION

Hershel Dennis was as determined as he was diminutive, darting around the house with a football in his arm and the game in his head.

He was all of 5 years old, and already the allure of tackle football had taken hold.

“He was so tiny and small, I thought he must have been crazy wanting to play tackle,” said his mother, Rose Teofilo, who made the pint-sized boy settle for two years of flag football before graduating to tackle.

Even though Dennis displayed an aptitude for the game--”Every time he got hit, he just jumped up and surprised me,” his mother said--doubts followed the smallish running back into his freshman season at Long Beach Poly High.

“When I heard he wanted to play running back, he seemed a little undersized at first,” said Poly’s 6-foot-6, 235-pound tight end Marcedes Lewis. “But there was something about him. I knew he would be special.”

Special indeed.

Dennis, who has grown to 6 feet and 182 pounds, has become the central component of a Poly team that plays Huntington Beach Edison tonight at Edison Field for the Southern Section Division I championship.

Dennis has averaged 7.9 yards per carry, 129.3 yards per game and has scored 21 touchdowns while rushing for 1,551 yards this season.

He is so crucial to the Jackrabbit offense that Los Alamitos, Poly’s semifinal opponent, unveiled a game plan devised specifically to stop him.

The Griffins limited Dennis to 94 yards in 25 carries, but the Jackrabbits turned to their passing game and cruised to a 28-7 victory.

“It’s a mistake to key on me because of all the other great athletes we have on the team,” Dennis said.

“It just opens it up for the other guys.”

Still, Poly Coach Raul Lara acknowledged that if he were a defensive coordinator charged with stopping the Jackrabbits, he would focus on Dennis as well.

“If you stop the run,” Lara said, “you make an offense one-dimensional.”

Stopping Dennis, of course, isn’t easy.

“He fights for every yard,” Los Alamitos Coach John Barnes said. “You think he’s down and he maintains his balance or breaks out for another 10 yards. He is special that way. He is a threat every time he touches the ball.”

Said Poly offensive lineman Winston Justice: “He makes the linemen look good by setting up the defenders so we can block them. The defenders will think he’s going one way, and we’ll block them, and then he’ll go another.”

Dennis is as quiet and respectful as he is elusive, and perhaps that’s the result of being the youngest child in a large family. Half African-American and half Samoan, Dennis has four half-sisters on his mother’s side and three half-brothers and a half-sister on his father’s side.

Carrying the football is in his blood--his father, Hershel Dennis Sr., played tailback for North Carolina A&T;, and one of his half-brothers, also named Hershel Dennis, was a standout running back at Diamond Bar High--but talking a big game isn’t.

“He’s a very quiet kid.... That’s the way I raised him,” Teofilo said. “Even when his sisters joke around, all he does is laugh.”

Yet, Dennis commands his teammates’ respect with only a few words.

“He’s probably the captain on this team,” Lara said.

“When he talks, everybody listens. And he doesn’t do too much talking, so when he’s talking, it’s like, OK, wait a minute.”

Dennis, a senior, is also a leader in the classroom, where he will have enough credits to graduate in January. He has narrowed his choices to USC, Washington and Oregon.

Dennis said he needs to improve his quickness and add a few pounds before heading to college, but his first priority is leading Poly to a third consecutive title.

“I’m trying to leave high school with three rings on my finger,” he said.