THE BIG GAME : Anatomy of a Fight : Football: Thousand Oaks and Westlake high schools prepare for their annual grudge match.

“Pond scum,” says Mike Ensign, a freckle-faced ninth-grader at Thousand Oaks High School. He is speaking of the 1,670 students at Westlake High School.

“They stink!” barks a sophomore footballer as an afternoon practice opens at Westlake High. He is speaking of Mike Ensign and his 2,120 confederates at Thousand Oaks High.

High school football is the subject here. Ever since 1979, when the Conejo Valley Unified School District moved to relieve the pressure on Thousand Oaks High School and opened the Westlake campus seven miles to the southeast, a rivalry has simmered. And this year, when Thousand Oaks and Westlake turned out to have the two best football teams in their league and perhaps in the county, the hostilities reached a full boil.

So the meeting of the Thousand Oaks Lancers and Westlake Warriors last Friday night--with the league championship and some considerable pride at stake--promised some sort of temporary resolution.

In one sense, it was simple as a contest gets: several dozen youths in bright jerseys running into each other for a few hours; a few thousand family members and friends in the stands; a game of one-upmanship between neighboring suburban student populations who, without color-coded signs and battle cries, are impossible to tell apart.

But in another sense, the big game was anything but simple. It required concentration and cooperation among hundreds of distracted teen-agers, from the athletes to the marching band to the cheerleaders. It cost the school district a few dollars, and the community’s booster clubs a few thousand, though the booster clubs usually recoup a fair amount selling concession-stand snacks. It took up scores of volunteer hours, consumed hundreds of bingo cards and two deep casserole dishes full of Marlo Thompson’s shepherd’s pie.

The Conejo Valley is not West Texas. But even in a comfortable suburb that teems with distractions for teen-agers and their parents, prep football claims more attention than much of the world at large. Over a week of preparations and exhortations on two campuses last week, the big game cast a long shadow.

MONDAY: The key to winning FTBL.

The Westlake High School marquee was stingy with vowels and punctuation. “FTBL AT TO 11/2 730,” it said.

The T-shirt on the young athlete by the coach’s office was more oblique than direct. “Pain Is Temporary,” it asserted. “Pride Is Forever.”

But the week’s theme was clear enough. And while those messages circulated outside, Westlake coach Jim Benkert delivered his own inside. The team was stuffed into a bungalow room 11D and Benkert, in his second year at the school, was up front.

From a distance, Benkert looks like he might still be a student, and one not quite big enough to be a lineman. But Benkert is in his early 30s, a survivor of several high school football seasons as a coach in the San Fernando Valley and Ventura County. He spoke in loud, clear and blunt words.

“Are you all with me on this?” Benkert said.

Benkert complimented the varsity team on its performance the previous Friday, a 56-6 dismantling of Simi Valley High, and then turned to a batch of inspirational letters from fans and alumni. Benkert had solicited them even before the Simi Valley game was over, planning to pull them out as a morale-booster for the Thousand Oaks game.

“This one’s forever,” said one letter. Benkert liked those words enough to have them stenciled onto a T-shirt, which he gave away--another morale-booster--to Jim Moffat, an offensive lineman on crutches with a twisted ankle.

Benkert took over at Westlake in 1989, and brought the team in at 4-5-1, a passable season given the lean years that had come before. Then this year, quarterback Todd Preston emerged as one of Southern California’s top college prospects. Benkert built an attack dependent upon finesse and Preston’s passing, and in eight games, the team had eight wins.

Benkert makes a point of saying his job is to teach his players discipline and sportsmanship and not just to win football games. But his ideas do sometimes rub up against those of other school officials--when one of his kids was caught asleep in class recently, for instance. Benkert heard that Westlake officials had decided to punish the youth by holding him out of a football practice. That didn’t make sense to Benkert.

“Discipline him, fine,” the coach said. “But when I discipline kids, I don’t take them out of math class.”

TUESDAY: The price of pompons.

Barbara Tuchman, eminent historian, lay idle at Thousand Oaks cheerleader practice. Tuchman’s analysis of the American Revolution, its binding broken, its due date two weeks past, was acting as a paperweight on a length of butcher paper that would soon read “Whip Westlake.”

The book was someone’s U.S. history assignment. Marty Crawford, the perky yet stern woman at the front of Room I6, was a current event.

“Ladies,” Crawford said, “May I have your attention?”

Crawford, the cheerleading adviser for Thousand Oaks, stood before three dozen gum-chewing, pompon-rustling, giggling and whispering girls. She ran down a long list of reminders, suggestions, commitments and entreaties. On the chalkboard at the head of the room, a much-amended schedule showed a month of school sporting events, most of which were expected to include cheerleading. The girls sat, smacked, rustled and gossiped.

“Girls, be quiet!” Crawford said. “I’m worried about JV volleyball. . . . Why do you feel no obligation to cover volleyball? What do we tell the girls’ volleyball team? That we just can’t be bothered?”

Finally the adviser got what she wanted, and the varsity, sophomore and freshman squads were dispatched to sign-painting and routine practicing. All the signs were for Friday night’s football game, and catchy slogans were needed.

“Welcome to Thousand Oaks. Now go home,” suggested Jackie Peacock, a 17-year-old senior and one of the 13 varsity cheerleaders.

“Traditionally,” said Kari Gonzales, a 15-year-old sophomore cheerleader, “we had a better football team than they did. And they were jealous.”

Others suggested hard feelings because the 29-year-old Thousand Oaks campus has its own stadium. The 11-year-old Westlake campus does not, though a stadium is in the works, and Westlake athletes sometimes share Thousand Oaks High’s facilities.

“I don’t know why people think they’re so rich,” Peacock said. “They don’t have a pool, either.” She again bent over her sign-painting.

“The only problem I have,” said Crawford, speaking of the squad, “is when they try to use something from “The Simpsons.” What Bart can say on television is not necessarily what my cheerleaders can say in their signs.”

Crawford, who graduated from Thousand Oaks High in 1977, took over the squad this year.

“I cheered in college, so I knew what I was in for,” she said with a sigh. “What I have been surprised at is the amount of time that is expected from the girls. We cover boys’ and girls’ sports. If you put together all three squads, we run between six and 12 games a week.”

And the investment, Crawford said, goes far beyond volunteering time. Many football players are asked to contribute about $100 toward the cost of their uniforms and equipment, and the booster club and athletic programs usually cover the rest. But each Thousand Oaks cheerleader puts in more than $800 to pay for different outfits for basketball and football, shoes, stools, jackets and transportation to games, among other things.

During football season, the spending gap gets wider: By tradition, the cheerleaders buy the players treats every week--sunflower seeds, gum, candy, baked goods.

And for some, there can be other sacrifices.

“This is not my real voice,” Niki Zewe, 16, said in a raspy whisper. She hasn’t sounded like herself since she went hoarse at a basketball game against Westlake nine months before, she said. She has nodules on her vocal cords.

“They’re going to go in and laser them off,” she said. “I did too much from my throat and not my diaphragm.”

The surgery is scheduled for the next Friday. Nevertheless, she said, she’d be out there with the squad on Friday night, hip-flouncing, pyramid-building--and lip-syncing.

WEDNESDAY: Gaming and the game.

A few years ago, when the California Lottery was still on the drawing board, many of its opponents complained that there was something unseemly in supporting school programs with gambling money.

Those people should never visit Westlake High School on a Wednesday night.

“I-19. I-19,” intoned a dull male voice on the school cafeteria’s public address system, and a lighted game board flashed on the wall above the room. Smoke curled ceilingward from scores of cigarettes, 150 hands daubed at cardboard squares with oversized felt pens, and among the committed bingo players at the lunch tables, scarcely a word was spoken.

“G-55. G-55.”

This was at 7 p.m., still early in the evening, and the Westlake High School Support Assn. was celebrating its seventh anniversary. It was Halloween night, and the crowd of players was a bit smaller than usual, but at a minimum of $12 a head and an average of about $50 per person per night, those players were still contributing substantially to the football team, the band, the choir and various other activities of Westlake High School.

The Westlake bingo game is run by volunteers from various school programs. But the players, mostly women in their 40s and beyond, often have no connection to the campus but bingo. The revenues are shared under a complex system that takes into account both the number of students in a program and the volunteer hours donated through each program. While the bingo players sat silent, daubers in their right hands, cigarettes in their left, coaches and parents circulated in aprons, selling additional cards.

The bingo operation, open 49 Wednesdays a year, brought in an estimated profit of $100,000 in the last year after expenses, which are considerable. Each game offers a $250 pot--the maximum allowed by state law--and there are 27 games in a night.

About $10,000 of the take went to football, said Molly Slavin, a board member of the support association. That would be about a third of the Westlake football program’s overall cost, which Benkert estimated at $28,000 to $30,000. It also helps explain why, three days before the biggest game of the year, the school football coach is shuffling around the cafeteria in a blue apron, making change for the bingo faithful.

“‘I took my kid trick-or-treating, then I came here,” Benkert said.

“I don’t play myself,” said Kathy Andrea, a volunteer who was working the pull-tab window. “But it’s a good cause. It costs a lot to run all these programs. . . . If they don’t mind spending it, I guess I don’t mind taking it.”

THURSDAY: The Final practice.

At 1:15, the varsity team pulled on jerseys and helmets for the last practice of the week. Bob Richards was in Room G-5, where he teaches math, settling up test scores with a persistent student.

Richards wore a button-down shirt and tie, with thick glasses and silver hair raked across his head. The student lingered until Richards told him that his last test score was in the mid-90s. Then the boy headed for the door.

“That kid’s got a sophomore football game today,” Richards said, “and he’s more worried about his math test.”

Richards, 48, started playing high school football in 1957, started coaching in 1966, and became an assistant football coach at Thousand Oaks High in 1967. If Jim Benkert at Westlake is the rising youth in the area’s coaching ranks, then Richards is among the seasoned veterans.

He credits former head coach Joe Howell with building up the community’s dedication to the football program, but it was under Richards’ leadership as head coach through the last eight years that the Thousand Oaks team has been a perennial power.

Through the first eight games of this season, Thousand Oaks was 6-1-1. This week, Richards said, he was trying to focus his team on its own capabilities and not on the rivals across town. Which is not to say he wasn’t curious.

“You were out at Westlake Monday?” Richards asked a visitor. “How did they look?”

They looked the way Richards’ players did now--large for their age, extraordinarily fit and confident, but no more articulate than the average high school student. Out on the practice field, the Thousand Oaks varsity players were doubled over in stretching exercises, muttering to each other.

“What you’ve got to do is change your garage into a den--or make it your room,” said one voice.

“How’d you do in ceramics today?” asked another.

“My mother would give my brother anything ,” complained another.

“It’s a delicate balancing act,” counselor Chuck Andrews had been saying earlier that day, “to be able to handle the academic load that the other students are handling and give . . . that two or three hours for practice every day and time for games as well.”

Andrews is responsible for counseling about 430 students, including four of the varsity football players. He also serves as public address announcer for Lancer Stadium.

“The kids who are athletes have the ability to focus a little more than other kids, because they’re required to pay attention,” said Andrews, a former soccer coach himself.

“I also think the athletes tend to have a little more poise than kids who are not athletes. They can think on their feet a lot better than many kids.”

Out on the practice field, Richards had emerged from the gym in conventional coach’s garb--shorts, a gray T-shirt, a baseball cap--and presided over agility drills, offense drills and defense drills. The coach strolled among his troops like a benevolent dictator, until a reserve player was revealed in a moment of inattention.

“Get where you belong!” the coach growled, exasperated and sarcastic. “You’re getting yourself ready to play, I can see that.”

When time came for the big pep talk, Richards said only a few words, quietly, and left the rhetorical fireworks to offensive coordinator Paul Gomes. Gomes, a 1977 graduate of Thousand Oaks and a volunteer coach ever since, stood while the players kneeled.

“So what do we need to say up here? Nothing,” he said. “Remember what’s important--the league championship. We are the league champs .”

FRIDAY: A note, a napkin, a tie.

Game time was 7:30 p.m., but the Westlake Warriors reported for a pregame briefing in the early afternoon. They marched in past the following note posted on the bulletin board:

“ ‘They’re a first-half team. They’ll fade in the later part of the season’--Thousand Oaks on the Westlake Warriors.”

Fighting words. There was no explanation of where they came from, but that hardly mattered. Coach Benkert convened the team behind closed doors for a final strategy and motivation talk, then sent the players off to their traditional pregame meal, this time a shepherd’s pie repast at the home of wide receiver/defensive back Tim Thompson.

In the coaches’ room, a stranger in a blue suit sat at a video monitor, running tapes. On the screen, Todd Preston danced forward and backward. The stranger, whispered assistant football coach Gary McGinnis, was a recruiter from the University of Oregon, and he would be in the bleachers that night.

“They come in all the time,” McGinnis said.

While his teammates bantered and swaggered at the poolside pregame meal, Preston sat nearly silent, a UNLV baseball cap on his head, eyes cast down toward his plate and napkin. The napkin was orange with shiny blue customized printing on it. “Beat T.O.,” it said.

After the shepherd’s pie, there was cake--blue and orange frosting, peppered with tiny plastic footballs, and each player’s number on a football. Marlo Thompson, Tim’s mother, had taken the team roster down to the bakery at Alpha Beta.

“To tell you the truth, I have no idea how much it cost,” she said, accepting thanks as the players filed out. “I just did it.”

By 6:30, traffic was backing up in the left lane of Moorpark Road near the Thousand Oaks campus. A couple of teen-agers were on the hood of a car, slowly cruising the school parking lot. The Thousand Oaks band was massing in the campus quad, and the evening air was cool enough to make the many letterman’s jackets on hand seem sensible.

“Tension’s fillin’ the air real quick,” said Gary McGinnis, striding past throngs of students and parents.

Over his shoulder, a familiar din rose above the Thousand Oaks cheering section: “ We’ve got spirit, yes we do. We’ve got spirit. How ‘bout you? “

Up in the announcer’s booth, Chuck Andrews scribbled on a clipboard and checked the teams’ rosters.

On the field, Jim Benkert paced among his stretching players, his head down, serious as a monk.

In the coaches’ box above the announcer’s booth, Bob Richards was setting up shop--a surprise move, and the first time since 1984 that he had decided to lead his team from there, where the view is better, and not the sidelines. The idea, Richards explained later, was to better analyze Westlake’s proficient passing attack.

The stadium was packed--5,000 people or more--and all up and down the bleachers, high school rituals were in performance. There was the tossing of hair; the thrusting of hands into pockets; the whiff of gum; the knots of conspiracy, male and female; the rows of hoarse mothers and binoculars-bearing fathers.

The game was excruciating. Thousand Oaks took a 7-0 lead while Westlake’s offense struggled, then pushed it to 14-0. After one failed Westlake offensive series, Benkert took his quarterback aside for some not-so-gentle advice. “Shut your mouth!” Benkert said. “And listen to me!”

By halftime, Westlake had narrowed the Thousand Oaks lead to 21-14.

The second half was something else again, a tug-of-war that left Westlake leading 34-33 with less than two minutes left. When Thousand Oaks missed an extra-point attempt, the school’s cheerleaders tumbled down from their shaky pyramid beneath the goal posts and hustled back to reassure the troops in the bleachers.

“Let’s go, Thousand Oaks!” rasped a familiar voice. It was Niki Zewe, who was supposed to be lip-syncing.

“Yeah, well. . . . “ she said.

Then Westlake scored again, and seemed unbeatable with an 8-point lead and 76 seconds left. On the Westlake sideline, Jim Benkert traded a high-five with receiver Seamus Gibbons. In the bleachers, a few thousand Westlake fans united with their own cheerleading squad in a taunting chorus.

“ We’ve got spirit, yes we do . . . ‘ ‘

But wait. The contest’s less-celebrated quarterback, Scott Peterson of Thousand Oaks, quickly silenced the Westlake side, and led a drive from his own 31-yard-line to the Westlake end zone. On the extra-point attempt, Peterson rolled to the right, dodged a few desperate linemen, and found himself in the end zone with the score 41-41 and just 16 seconds remaining. So it ended.

To take the Marmonte League title for the first time since 1982, Westlake would have to defeat Royal High School this week. Thousand Oaks, current title holder, would need a victory over Agoura High--and a Royal defeat of Westlake--in order to keep its championship.

Richards hustled down from the coaches’ box, slacks flapping in the cold wind, to commend his troops and congratulate the enemy quarterback, Todd Preston, on his performance.

“It’s good,” said Westlake sophomore coach Bill Culpepper, heading for the locker room. “It’ll give us some character.”

Near the 30-yard line, a crowd gathered around Thousand Oaks lineman Mike Ciandella, who lay motionless, the apparent victim of a neck injury on the last play of the game. (He left in an ambulance, but school officials later said the injury was not serious, and that the athlete was back at school on Monday.)

Marty Crawford, Zewe and the other cheerleaders had fled. Andrews had packed up his clipboard. The stadium was quiet, and close to mid-field, the opposing coaches fell into step together. After seven days of preparation and 48 minutes of game time, their pace was leisurely.

“The situation is the same as coming in,” Richards said, “but there’s one game less to go.”

The Rivalries

Before last Friday’s tie, Thousand Oaks and Westlake had met 10 times. Thousand Oaks won half; Westlake, the other half. In other local football rivalries:

* Ventura High School and Buena High School have met every year but one since 1962. They played on Oct. 19 this year, and Ventura took a 27-20 win in front of more than 6,000 fans. Historically, the series stands at Buena 15, Ventura 12.

* Santa Paula Union High School and Fillmore High School will meet for the 80th time at 7:30 p.m. this Friday at Fillmore High. Of the 79 games played so far, Santa Paula has won 45, Fillmore 33. There was one tie.

So Far and Yet So Close

They may have their differences on the football field, but in plenty of other categories, rivals Westlake High School and Thousand Oaks High School seem indistinguishable.

* On a socioeconomic scale of 1 to 5, based on parents’ years of formal education, the state put Westlake at 3.92, Thousand Oaks at 3.84.

* In last spring’s California Assessment Program tests, the seniors at both schools scored in the top 21%, or better, in every subject. Thousand Oaks was narrowly better in reading and math, Westlake in writing, but they were never more than 2 percentage points apart.

* In a county where more than 30% of residents are Latino, black, Asian or members of other minority groups, both schools reported minority student populations of less than 15%.

FAN ON THE FACULTY: J12