Eric Reis, who amassed 150 wins and five Sac-Joaquin Section titles during 16 years as Manteca High’s head football coach, is now a published author.

It’s not about football.

And don’t judge the book titled “Isle of Arran: A Mystical Turas” by its cover.

It’s a fantasy novel but it’s rooted in the ageless reality that — once you strip away skin tone, ethnicity, and other cloaks such as faith and status — “people are people.”

Reis started the book in 1989 during his redshirt year as a football player at San Jose State University.

He had gone with two Somalian teammates to see the movie “House Party”.

When Christopher “Kid” Reid — an inspiring rapper — sneaks out of his house to go to a party, his father follows him.

That cues up a movie scene where police stop Kid’s father and harass him.

It is at that point in the movie jeering breaks out in the theater.

Reis said he looked around and realized he was the only white person in the crowd.

It is when he understood that people don’t really know what other people are up against until they walk in their shoes.

“People are people,” Reis said, adding that when everything is stripped away people are basically the same.

How people face trials and tribulations may be different in some form or fashion is a story as old as civilization itself.

Yet, Reis managed to create a new vehicle to drive home the point.

The novel starts in today’s world.

Three Ivy League frat boys with political connections are on the cusp of not getting their college degrees due to failing a Black professor’s course.

A magical portal takes the trio back to the 13th century to the Isle of Arran off Scotland’s coast.

It is there were the roles are reversed.

People from their lives in the present are on the island but they do not know the trio.

The Black professor is a slave trader from Africa looking for Scots to enslave.

The new reality of turned tables turns into a raging conflict that engulfs the island in a winner take-all conflict.

The bottom line: The outcome changes the fate of the three frat boys and the course of the world.

The island, by the way, does exist.

Reis conducted extensive research to reflect the realties of the setting. He hopes one day to visit the Isle of Arran.

Reis, who has served as the Manteca High athletic director since 2017, completed the book last year.

“Family, football, and life happened,” Reis, who is working on a sequel noted,

So did technology.

He started out pounding away on a manual typewriter and ended up finishing the novel on a computer.

That said, throughout the 35 year gestation period for his book, he kept periodically thinking and reflecting about it and what had inspired him to take the plunge into writing.

Reis said growing up in Manteca during the 1970s there was a lack of diversity that there is today.

The exception, to a degree, was in sports.

Reis credits football and the discipline needed to succeed for giving him the mindset needed to tackle and complete his first novel.

Dorrance Publishing partnered with Reis to publish the 363-page novel. It is available through Barnes & Noble, Amazon, Dorrance, and other platforms.

Reis is a Manteca native and among those born at Manteca Hospital before it because Doctors Hospital of Manteca.

The 1987 Manteca High graduate was a lineman on the Buffs football team and also played tennis.

He went to Delta College for two years, San Jose State his junior year, and graduated from Cal Poly San Luis Obispo.

To contact Dennis Wyatt, email dwyatt@mantecabulletin.com