Two-Step to Booming Music : Football: Already in the Moorpark record book and one of the top junior college punters in the state, Robert Ralston has shortened his stride to add quickness and marketability.

As a mid-afternoon wind whips through the Moorpark College football stadium,

Robert Ralston grabs a football, drops it on his right foot and kicks it high into the air and 50 yards downfield with remarkable ease.

“I try to punt to specific spots on the field,” said Ralston, a sophomore. “I usually work on making the ball skip out of bounds in a particular spot.”

Ralston is the only Moorpark player around. After only a few minutes of working on punting situations, the rest of the squad has gone to a nearby field for the rest of practice. Ralston is left alone to refine his skills, with no one to even retrieve the balls he kicks.

“I don’t mind it,” Ralston said. “It’s peaceful.”

It’s also, apparently, quite effective.

Since joining the Raiders out of Hueneme High, Ralston has been one of the top junior college punters in the nation.

He ranks fourth in the state with a 40.9-yard average going into Moorpark’s game today at 1 p.m. at West Los Angeles College.

Despite their 4-1 record, the Raiders have sputtered offensively and Ralston has become an indispensable figure for the team. His punting often pushes opponents deep into their territory, and gives the Moorpark defense plenty of breathing room.

That was also the case last year when Ralston set several school punting records and finished second in the state and sixth in the nation with a 42.5-yard average.

In 1994, Ralston landed eight punts inside the 10-yard line and 18 punts inside the 20, both school records. But his best effort came in a 21-14 victory over Glendale, when he averaged 51 yards to set a Moorpark single-game record and ripped a punt 75 yards, setting another standard.

“Still to this day, I don’t know how I did that,” Ralston said. “I guess it just caught a jet stream.”

Ralston later found that breaking certain records could be painful.

A few days after the Glendale game, he was invited to dinner at the home of Moorpark assistant Will Thurston, who averaged 44.8 yards per punt in a game against Santa Barbara in 1976 and held the record until Ralston snapped it. The coach was happy for Ralston but not everyone in his household shared the feeling.

“One of his two [young] kids came up to me and said, ‘You broke my daddy’s record,’ and hit me in the leg,” Ralston said, laughing.

Ralston, 6 feet 1 and 175 pounds, didn’t arrive at Moorpark with grandiose ideas. He played soccer in youth leagues but switched to football at Hueneme, where he was a wide receiver before becoming a punter.

“I picked up a football and I asked the coach if I could be a punter,” Ralston said. “He said, ‘OK. If you don’t punt the ball 40 yards, you have to run a lap.’ I punted the ball something like 50 yards. I just stuck to punting from there.”

The Vikings gave him plenty of chances. In Ralston’s last two seasons, Hueneme was 1-16 and struggled to score, averaging 15.5 points in 1992 and 10.5 points in 1993. Ralston said he punted more than 60 times in his junior season, doing it mostly with mirrors.

“I never really had anybody teach me [in high school],” Ralston said.

Until this season, Ralston was a three-step punter, a technique that generates more momentum and power than a two-step approach but sacrifices quickness. He changed to two steps to improve his chances of being recruited to a four-year program. The change hasn’t cost him much distance.

“Last year and this year, I’ve worked a lot on technique,” Ralston said. “If I mess up a punt, I don’t worry about it because I know I’ll get another chance. . . . To be a good punter, you have to be calm. You can’t really be worried about anything.”

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Coach Jim Bittner, who has seen plenty of good punters in his 17 seasons at Moorpark, was impressed with Ralston from the start.

“He came down one day and brought his parents with him,” Bittner recalled. “He would punt the ball, run down, bring it back and punt it again. . . . He’s just a bundle of energy.”

And, like a lot of punters and kickers, someone who sometimes dances to the beat of his own drum.

“This year, I was going to buy bunny slippers to wear on the bus [to games], but I couldn’t find the right size,” Ralston said with a smile.

Said Bittner: “Nothing that Ralston does surprises me. He’s on a different page.”

Not only on the field, but also on the Raider record book.