Pedersen was thrown into the deep end to carry the Kangaroos' ruck duties on Sunday against West Coast when regular ruckmen Hamish McIntosh (Achilles), Drew Petrie (suspended) and Todd Goldstein were all unavailable.
That left the 193cm 24-year-old having to virtually take on four-time All-Australian Dean Cox on his own, and while the big Eagle was close to best on ground, Pedersen competed well finishing with 20 possessions, five marks, 14 hit outs and four clearances.
Having made his way onto the North list after playing in the VFL for Box Hill, Pedersen was delighted to make his debut and do the best he could against Cox.
"It was a great learning curve. Obviously Goldy got sick and couldn’t take his place and the club was good enough to give me a shot in the first place when they picked me up, and now selected me for this game and I got to play ruck, which was great and a good start for me," Pedersen said.
"All I had to do was just try and halve the contests and then let the structures that we had put in place take care of that after the centre bounces. The boys in the midfield helped me out a lot with that as well."
Pedersen showed that he's more than capable of playing good AFL football and he enjoyed his debut appearance aside from the loss.
"I just focused on running to where I was told in the instructions and I was lucky enough to get used a bit. Obviously if the team doesn’t get the ball then I can't get it myself so it was good in the end and I enjoyed it," he said.
"It's a bit sort of surreal. I'd like to thank the club after they took a bit of a punt on me because I'm a bit older. They've been great to me since I've been here at the club. I had a really good pre-season here, which has helped my fitness and hopefully I can go onwards and upwards from here."
Collingwood now awaits North Melbourne on Saturday at Etihad Stadium and Pedersen is looking forward to taking it up to the reigning premiers with the help of the returning Goldstein and Petrie.
"Next week we will have Goldy back, Drew Petrie back and they are pretty much our two best talls with McIntosh out for a while with his injury," Pedersen said.
"That should make us a different side and hopefully we can knock off Collingwood. If we play to our structures and when we are on song we can beat anyone, so it should be a good game."
