Full House Backfield Pays Off : Serra High’s Speedsters Rack Up 40 Touchdowns in Seven Games : Preps: Coach Leo Hand has only one favorite play, the pitch. That’s where his player pitches the ball to the referee after crossing the goal line.

When Leo Hand became head football coach at Serra High School last spring, he explained his offensive philosophy in simple terms.

“I told the players I only have one favorite play in football, and that’s the pitch play,” he said. “That’s where the guy crosses the goal line and pitches the ball to the referee.”

Hand stole the line from former USC Coach John McKay, but it applies to Serra perhaps more than it ever did to the Trojans. Through seven games this season, the Cavaliers have crossed the goal line 40 times, an average of 5.7 touchdowns per game.

Serra’s speedy full-house backfield of quarterback Fred Safford, fullback Dennis Gerard and halfbacks Lamont Daniel and Jerald Henry have done the bulk of the scoring, accounting for 36 touchdowns--all on the ground.

This is a team that likes to run. And run. And run.

“We’ll run until someone stops the run,” Safford said, matter-of-factly. “Then we’ll pass. But ain’t no one stopped the run yet.”

Serra’s team statistics support Safford. The Cavaliers lead the South Bay in rushing with 2,104 yards, an average of 301 per game, and they are last in passing with 220 yards, an average of 31 per game. In last Friday’s 52-6 win over St. Anthony, the Cavaliers rushed for 355 yards and attempted two passes, both incomplete.

So far, the lack of a passing attack hasn’t hurt. Serra (7-0 overall, 2-0 in the Camino Real League) has outscored its opponents, 276-39, and is ranked No. 2 behind Lompoc in the Southern Section Division VII poll.

The Cavaliers figure to add to their lopsided stats Friday night when they visit hapless Pius X of Downey (0-7, 0-2) in a Camino Real League game.

All four members of Serra’s full-house backfield credit team unity for their impressive start. There is no jealousy among the stars.

“We decided to play as a team and not individually,” Safford said. “We act as a family. It’s not just going out there and saying, ‘I’m going to get mine, I hope you get yours.’ It’s more of a team concept.”

Said Gerard, who leads the team with 18 touchdowns: “I think the fact that our line works hard, both in practice and in the games, and the defense holds the other teams to few scores makes it easy on us.”

The diminutive members of the backfield--all four starters are 5-foot-9 or shorter--also give a great deal of credit to Hand and his 22 years of experience.

Before he arrived at Serra, Hand intended to run an I formation. But once he got to the Gardena school, he realized he had too many talented tailbacks to limit the offense to just one starter.

“This is something I decided to do with these particular athletes,” he said of the full-house T offense. “We wanted to utilize as many (tailbacks) as we possibly could. Right now, we’ve got three of them in there.”

That would be Henry and Daniel, the team’s halfbacks, and Safford, who is basically a tailback playing quarterback. Together with Gerard, a powerful runner who can bench press 325 pounds, the backfield gives opposing defenses plenty to be concerned about.

“You can’t focus on one guy,” said Gardena Coach Mike Sakurai, whose team lost to the Cavaliers, 36-13, on Sept. 22. “You can’t get caught up looking into the backfield because they run a lot of misdirection. They can attack you at different places with all the speed they have.”

Hand learned the full-house T from Taft College Coach Al Baldock and used it off-and-on during his four years as head coach at Servite High in Anaheim. He described it as “sequence football.” The formation consists of three running backs, two wide receivers and no tight end.

“All the plays are tied together,” Hand said. “We start with the basic play, which is running Dennis (Gerard) off tackle. Then we draw up all the different defenses in football. We figure out every way teams can stop it.

“When they do the things they need to do to stop Dennis, then they have left themselves vulnerable in some other area. And it’s my job to find that out.”

In last week’s win over St. Anthony, Serra used Gerard mostly as a decoy during the first quarter and had success running the ball wide to Daniel and Henry. After building a 14-0 lead in the first quarter, the Cavaliers went to Gerard on the first play of the second quarter and the fullback busted loose for a 65-yard touchdown run.

After just 10 offensive plays, Serra had built a 22-0 lead.

Gerard, a 5-9, 190-pound senior who lives in Carson, said Serra’s ability to run at will has a demoralizing effect on opponents.

“After a while, no one wants to tackle us head-on,” he said. “They go for the legs. Pasadena came out fired up against us. But it got to the point where we were coming at them so hard, they didn’t want to hit us any more. They would just step to the side and make a soft tackle. Then they stopped talking.”

Serra silenced Pasadena, 40-0, in its opener.

Although Hand will not release individual statistics until after the season in order to maintain his philosophy of “team before player,” the coach said Gerard surpassed the 1,000-yard mark last week.

The rest of the backfield starters also have been productive.

Safford, a 5-6, 155-pound senior from Inglewood, has seven touchdowns. Henry (5-8, 170), a junior from Carson whose older brother John was an All-Camino Real League running back at Verbum Dei last year, has eight TDs. And Daniel (5-8, 152), a senior who has run the 100 meters in 10.9 seconds, has three TDs.

To a man, the backs say they are on a mission to reach the Division VII championship game. Serra’s only previous appearance in a Southern Section final was in 1980, a team the present group is frequently compared with.

Last year, the Cavaliers reached the second round of the playoffs after capturing their third consecutive Camino Real League title. A win over rival Verbum Dei on Nov. 2 will make it four in a row.

“We want to go out in style,” Gerard said. “With rings on our fingers and shirts and jackets.”

If Serra keeps playing the way it has, the football team may well be the best-dressed group on campus come December.