It Was Sweet 15 for Oceanside : Football Team Got the Present in Jerry Garrett

On his birthday last Nov. 6, Jerry Garrett blew out more than the flames of 15 candles.

Garrett, then a sophomore quarterback, celebrated by running and passing Oceanside High School to a 31-0 blowout of playoff-bound El Camino. The statistical birthday card included two touchdowns runs and a touchdown pass.

That performance was a mere promo for the full-length feature in which Garrett is now starring.

“He’s incredible,” Oceanside Coach Roy Scaffidi said. “He’s a bona fide phenom. God put a kiss right on that kid’s head when he was born.”

Scaffidi has had just 6 varsity games in which to judge Garrett, but a number of coaches, scouts and fans agree Garrett has a very bright future.

“He’s probably one of the premier football players in the county,” Scaffidi said before the season. “He will make me a good coach.”

So far, he has. Oceanside, with victories over Vista (24-0) and Mater Dei (36-34), is 2-0 and ranked second in both The Times’ San Diego County Top 10 and Cal-Hi Sports’ Southern California Division AAA.

But Oceanside’s success cannot be attributed to Garrett alone, and he will be the first to say so.

“I hate for people to think that I’m just for myself,” Garrett said. “They see my name in the paper and say, ‘Oh, see, he’s just for himself, he doesn’t worry about other players.’ That’s not true. Our receivers will tell you. I want everybody to run the ball and take some of the pressure off me.”

The pressure is caused somewhat because he’s constantly being told how good he is. But the 4-sport letterman says he has learned to handle it.

“People tell me that (I’m good), but it doesn’t bother me as much as it used to,” Garrett said. “Now it doesn’t even faze me. I know I’m only going to be as good as I want to be.”

Garrett wants to be good enough at football to earn a college scholarship, and good enough as a student to have his pick of colleges.

“I want to excel high,” Garrett said. “I want to do things the way that I know I can, in the classroom, on the field, on the court, just anywhere. Last year, I didn’t really do that, except for on the field. In the classroom, I lagged.”

At school, he says, the pressure got to his head. He said he went to class but didn’t work there. As a result, he was academically ineligible for the second half of the basketball season.

“Now I know I’m going to have to sit down and push myself,” said Garrett, whose favorite subject is math. “I know with the grades I’ve been getting, I’m not going to be able to go anywhere I want. I want a lot of colleges to look at me so I can have more to decide from.”

But his ability to handle pressure isn’t why Scaffidi spews superlatives about Garrett. It’s the gifted athlete part.

“Jerry Garrett is blessed,” Scaffidi said. “Junior Seau (now a linebacker at USC), our All-American, had the biggest heart of any football player I’ve ever seen. He was blessed with great physical ability, size, strength, speed, balance, coordination. But Jerry Garrett is a better athlete than Junior. Jerry is the best athlete I’ve ever seen.

“You can talk about 4.4 (in the 40-yard dash) speed. You can talk about intelligence . . . You’re talking about a 4-sport athlete who could be a major star in any one of the those 4 sports.”

Barring injury or academic problems, he will probably leave Oceanside with 12 varsity letters. Besides football and basketball, Garrett was an outfielder on the baseball team and was selected to a under-15 San Diego all-star team that toured Mexico last summer. He also was a sprinter, long jumper and triple jumper on the track team, although he never practiced because of baseball.

Football, he says, is his favorite. But Garrett couldn’t just walk onto the varsity as a sophomore the way he did in the other sports.

It wasn’t lack of talent that kept Garrett on the junior varsity for the first eight games last season. It was age. According to California high school rules, an athlete must be 15 to play varsity football.

Scaffidi said he spent those first eight games last season “crying in my beer.”

“I was (upset) at the system that wouldn’t allow him (to play),” Scaffidi said. “Angry for myself, angry for the school at a system that really cheated the kid out of probably the greatest career that a high school quarterback could have ever enjoyed. You can’t do in 2 years what Todd Marinovich did in 4. You can’t do in 2 years what Marcus Allen did in 3. He was deprived, I think, of his civil rights.”

Scaffidi said watching Garrett junior varsity was like watching “a man playing with boys.” Garrett led the JV to a 7-1 record but developed bad habits that Scaffidi said he is still trying eliminate.

Then he turned 15, and the football future at Oceanside turned particularly bright. The Pirates were only 2-2 under Garrett last year, but almost every Avocado League coach mentioned Garrett as one of the best players in the league entering this season.

A week ago, Garrett spent the first half scrambling and passing his team to a 36-13 halftime lead over perennial Orange County power Mater Dei.

He completed 10 of 19 pass attempts for 216 yards, 2 completions going for touchdowns. Three passes were dropped. He threw a pass for a 2-point conversion. He ran for a touchdown. He kicked 4 extra points. He punted.

Garrett, 6-feet 1-inch and 185 pounds, was born in Anniston, Ala., and moved to Oceanside during the fifth grade when his father, a Marine, was transferred to Camp Pendleton. He attributes his outstanding athletic skills to his Pop Warner coaches and his “habit” of always playing with older kids.

Scaffidi says Garrett can throw the ball 70 yards. He can also run and has an affinity for the wishbone offense, such as that run by his favorite college player, Oklahoma’s Jamelle Holieway.

Coming into the season, Scaffidi restructured his offense to feature Garrett, who now runs something called the flex-bone.

“Whoever thought it up must have known Jerry Garrett was on the earth,” Scaffidi said. “He could be a tailback at USC, he’s that kind of runner.”

The flex-bone is a wishbone spiced with characteristics of the run-and-shoot. The running backs align behind the tackles instead of the guards, and the fullback is right behind the quarterback. The idea is to give the quarterback a lot of freedom.

Scaffidi said he knew the change would put pressure on Garrett.

“I have to monitor (him) constantly because he’s a 15-year-old,” Scaffidi said. “As soon as I see any signs or signals that he’s not dealing with that responsibility very constructively, than I’ll change it. I would do everything I could to lessen his fear that the success of our team rests solely on his shoulders.”

After the Mater Dei victory, Scaffidi was asked if Garrett is really as good as he showed in the first half of that game.

“He’s better,” Scaffidi said.

But what about the second half?

Garrett fumbled snaps and handoffs a total of five times, once when Oceanside had the ball at the Mater Dei 8-yard line with a chance to put the game away. Another came inside his own 30 and set up a Mater Dei score. He tried only four passes; one was dropped and three missed badly. Oceanside failed to record a first down.

At times, Garrett looked bored and tired. And at times he looked like, well, a 15-year-old.

“Not bored,” Garrett said. “I had just lost some enthusiasm. I don’t know, I just lost it.”

Garrett says one of his primary concerns this season will be making his teammates look good. If he doesn’t distribute the ball among three running backs and two receivers, plus get a few carries for himself, he said, he will have failed.

“We have a lot of seniors on the team,” he said. “I know they want to go (to college) just as bad as me. I want them to go places, too.”