Carrillo Hits His Stride at Moorpark : College football: Former track and field athlete becomes standout runner for Potato Bowl-bound Raiders.

Gil Carrillo, javelin thrower and occasional decathlete, wanted to be a football player. Wanted to be a running back.

When he approached the Moorpark College football coaches with this idea--four weeks into the team’s training camp--they easily could have sat him down for a little chat about the facts of football life.

You see, Gil, here’s the thing, they might have said. Imagine leaving your feet in the high jump. Imagine at that moment, as you are hanging in the air, a great, big man wearing a stone-hard helmet and running as fast as he can rams that helmet into the middle of your back.

Or imagine hitting stride midway through the 100-meter dash, head tucked low, eyes focused on the hard track ahead when, suddenly, out of nowhere, a snorting 275-pound beast leaps in front of you and swings a utility pole-sized forearm across your nose. Imagine . . . well, you get the point.

Yet the Moorpark coaches didn’t say any of that. What they did was to hand Carrillo a helmet and point him toward the football field.

That was the only direction he needed.

On Tuesday, the man with enough football experience to partially fill a shot glass was named offensive player of the year in the Western State Conference’s Northern Division. The 22-year-old fullback swayed the voting coaches with a stunning performance Nov. 21 against Glendale when he carried the ball 23 times, gained 244 yards and scored four touchdowns, including on runs of 52 and 80 yards.

Heading into Saturday’s Potato Bowl game against Bakersfield, Carrillo has rushed for 1,103 yards and 14 touchdowns in 135 carries, an average of 8.2 yards a carry.

Carrillo was a standout in track at Moorpark in 1989 and 1990 and, after redshirting in 1991, was a top member of the Cal State Northridge track team in 1992. His personal-best of 229 feet 5 inches is second on the Matadors’ all-time list with the new-style javelin.

But this summer he fell one unit short of remaining academically eligible at Northridge. So, although he had not touched a football since 1987, when he was a defensive back and very occasional running back--33 yards in 14 carries--at Simi Valley High as a senior, Carrillo enrolled again at Moorpark.

State junior college rules allow for such transfers, requiring only that a student maintained at least a 2.0 grade-point average during his previous stay at the school and that he did not use up his two years of eligibility in a sport.

At Moorpark, Carrillo quickly encountered a familiar face. Dave Murphy, his football coach at Simi Valley, now coaches the defensive backs at Moorpark.

“I said, ‘Gil, great decision,’ ” Murphy said. “Going to play some defensive back for us? He said he wanted to try offense and I kidded him about wanting the glory positions. But I knew Gil and I knew what a great athlete he was and I knew he could help this team.”

Because he was contemplating a return to Northridge in the fall semester, Carrillo’s decision to try football at Moorpark came a full month after the rest of the team had been working out.

“He came in and said he wanted to be a running back,” Coach Jim Bittner said. “Our philosophy here is to let a guy go where he wants to go, to let him try any position he wants to try. We give them a chance.”

Moorpark does not, however, have a lot of 155-pound offensive linemen playing just because they want to be offensive linemen. Nor do the Raiders use many wide receivers who cannot catch.

Bittner has a safety valve for his It’s a Free World philosophy of football.

“We look at guys like Gil with a guarded eye,” Bittner said. “They can all wish, but let’s just say not everyone gets their wish.”

Carrillo made the team, but there were no indications he would be much more than practice fodder for the defense. In his first game this season, against College of the Desert, he had three carries.

“When I first came out, the players didn’t exactly give me a big greeting,” Carrillo said. “The feeling was, ‘Who is this 22-year-old guy, this track guy? What does he think he’s doing?’ Coming in a month late didn’t help. I made the team, but I think it wasn’t until the second game of the season that the rest of the guys accepted me as football player. For a long time, I felt so uncomfortable around them.”

When the first hint of acceptance did come, it was only because Carrillo had shown himself to be a solid blocker.

“It was frustrating at first,” he said. “It was real discouraging. I wanted to carry the ball maybe 15 times a game. Three carries wasn’t what I was hoping for. I thought maybe they’d just use me all season as a blocker.

“But after that first game, Coach Bittner told me he just wanted me to get a feel for the offense and that I’d get the ball more in the next game.”

He did. He got it nine times. There was, Carrillo recalls, still no talk of a Heisman Trophy.

Each week brought more carries, more yards. Then, two weeks ago against Glendale, Carrillo ran wild.

“That was the high point of the season so far,” he said. “After that game I thought, ‘You can never top this.’ ”

The tough training regimen, including a grueling weightlifting program, that Carrillo used during his track career aided him in the transition to football, he said. As a senior at Simi Valley High he weighed 155 pounds. On Saturday, he will be cracking 195 rock-hard pounds into the Bakersfield defense.

In addition to helping build a powerful body, Carrillo’s track career has helped him in other ways too.

“When I break through the line, like on that 80-yard touchdown run against Glendale, I get the same feeling I had when I ran sprints,” Carrillo said. “I keep a good running form and concentrate on it. I don’t look back and I don’t slow down. It’s just off to the races.

“And instead of a finish line, there’s an end zone.”