Contreras Overcomes Bitterness : Opportunity: He quit after his father pushed him and his coach benched him, but the Channel Islands High quarterback returned in time for his senior year. Now the Raiders are challenging for a playoff berth with this reborn leader--and A-student--at the controls.

So Mark Contreras isn’t a Division I quarterback. Or a Division II quarterback. He barely hung around long enough to be a starting high school quarterback.

But Contreras is no longer filled with rage. The bitterness is mostly gone now. The scars of disappointment are easily covered by the quickest smile and brightest brown eyes you’ll ever see.

For it was Contreras, since childhood burdened with the responsibility of earning his keep by throwing the football, who had a safety valve all along. His considerable classroom ability, however, was overshadowed early on by his athletic prowess.

“From the fourth grade, I realized he had potential as a quarterback,” Mark’s father, Cal, says of his only son among five children. “I’m a middle-class person. I told Mark, ‘The only way to go to college was to get a scholarship in football or baseball.’ We had almost a blueprint of how it would go.”

You know the story, the one in which a certain redheaded robo-quarterback named Marinovich ransacks Tailback U.

So Mark Contreras, his video camera-toting father never far from focus, went to work. Wearing hiking boots, he ran the beaches of Oxnard, not far from Santa Clara High, where he would one day lose a starting job to Tim Gutierrez. He tossed sideline patterns to family members on sandlot fields in Channel Islands, very close to Channel Islands High, where he would one day stand on the sideline, watching Vince Medina quarterback the Raiders. His Raiders.

He pushed iron weights, further strengthening the wiry shoulders that would some day bear the load of all that had gone askew.

Entering tonight’s Marmonte League game against Camarillo, Contreras (5-foot-9, 165 pounds) has passed for 781 yards and eight touchdowns for Channel Islands (4-3 overall, 2-2 in league play), averaging an impressive 18.6 yards a completion. He is a senior, in his third season as a varsity player, but his first as a full-time starter.

The thought of finally owning the position he felt was rightfully his since the 1987 season so overwhelmed Contreras last winter that he, well . . . he quit the team. Skipped the football banquet. Canned the game, his team and Coach Joel Gershon for good. He’d had enough.

“The (1988) season ended and, to me, it was a big-time embarrassment,” Contreras says. “To me, that was my senior year. I didn’t show up at the banquet and I had a big fight with Coach Gershon about that. To him, that was like mocking the team. But, it was over. I didn’t want to have anything to do with their program anymore.

“I did not want to be at that banquet. What are they going to say to me? This is our second-string quarterback for the second straight year? I was embarrassed.”

But even more so, he was angry. And he was afraid.

Angry, because he believes he didn’t get a fair shot at Santa Clara, the school from which his father graduated in 1962 after playing for Lou Cvijanovich. He enrolled as a freshman at the small private school about the same time another freshman, Tim Gutierrez, did. Gutierrez (now 6-2, 195) went on to become a three-year starter and Ventura County’s career passing leader. Contreras, feeling overlooked, moved on to Channel Islands.

Let’s go to the videotape.

“I have the footage, every practice,” Cal Contreras says. “I’ve always said that my son had beaten Timmy out, but they said Timmy beat him out because he was taller. (Mark) would show, even in garbage detail, that he was better than Timmy.”

Angry, because he believes he didn’t get a fair shot at Channel Islands, where he was ineligible for five games in his sophomore season as a result of the transfer. Vince Medina, who was a year older than Contreras, was dubbed the starter. Medina handled the position with adequacy--if not flair--for the better part of Contreras’ sophomore and junior seasons.

Contreras did get the occasional start as a sophomore, including a crucial late-season game against Thousand Oaks. The Raiders lost, 27-6.

Roll ‘em.

“Even though it was not Mark’s fault,” Cal Contreras says, “they blamed it on him and used it as an excuse to start Vince.”

Angry, because the next season, Medina once again had the starting job.

Afraid, finally, because the blueprint, so meticulously prepared, had gone awry. “In a way, I was,” Mark conceded. “I didn’t have any experience playing. I was afraid. Come my senior year, I didn’t even know anything about what was going on.”

Gershon, the head coach, and Frank Gankas, the quarterback coach with whom Contreras had spent so many early-morning hours in the Channel Islands’ weight room, let him go in hopes he would return on his own. Shawn Young, the Raiders’ leading receiver, considered transferring to Santa Clara rather than face the prospect of running routes for anyone other than his best friend.

“He is a young man with a lot of aspirations and desires,” Gershon says of Contreras, “so his waiting period was frustrating. He has a lot of pride in himself and his performance. I’d like 60 guys who believe they should be first string. I think that’s healthy.”

Contreras, however, had grown sick of it.

“That was probably his worst time, emotionally,” Young says. “I tried to beg him--’C’mon man, one more year.’ What he had been through, I understood. He was not going to play, no way.”

But, in the midst of spring, while the team-- his team--was assembling for early afternoon practices, Contreras found inspiration in the most curious of places. It was at a musty gym in Oxnard--away from Santa Clara, away from Channel Islands, away from the bright lights and the video camera.

The man, he thought, was from the Midwest. Ohio, he vaguely remembered the guy saying. He, too, was a former quarterback. He, too, had missed his senior season.

“He was telling me he’d give anything to go back and play that last year,” Contreras says. “He was telling me you’ll really miss it. That you’ll miss out on a lot of experiences you’d never forget.”

On the final day of spring practice, Mark Contreras walked back onto the football field. Channel Islands needs to win tonight and next week against Royal to assure itself of a berth in the Division II playoffs, and the Raiders need Contreras to guide them.

“Mark’s ability lies in a good sense of the game,” Gankas said. “He reads the secondary. We don’t have to do a lot of learning and teaching with him. He picks things up so quick.”

As astute as he is on the football field, he has been that much more so in the classrooms of Santa Clara and Channel Islands.

And all along, right there, tucked somewhere between the ever-blitzing pressures to achieve and the fly pattern to excel, was his sure-handed safety valve.

Friday nights he’s the son of an armchair coach, but by day Contreras is the son of an English teacher: Cal teaches at Santa Paula High. Mark carries a 3.7 grade-point average and has scored well on college entrance examinations. For Contreras, as it turns out, college will come as a result of studying textbooks rather than secondaries.

Maturity came the same way.

“When I didn’t start those two years, that was a big thing,” he says. “That was like somebody telling me I wasn’t going to go to college. . . . but I still have that thing in my head from my father--you’ve got to do it, you’ve got to do it. Now, I’ve grown up and realized that I can still go to college.

“For so long, I wanted to hate Gershon. I looked for opportunities to tell a reporter, ‘this guy is screwing me over,’ you know? But, he hasn’t screwed me over. He’s given me an opportunity and given me a lot of experiences to grow on. Just being around him and his program is going to be with me for the rest of my life.

“I’ve learned how to work hard. Dedication. He’s given me a chance to learn.”

The pressures are mostly gone now. The video library still grows with every game, but not with the same sense of urgency. Cal Contreras no longer needs to sell his son. His son has sold himself--his own way.

“Someday,” Cal muses, “we’ll drink beer and watch old movies.”