FIVE-STAR PLAYER : Barnett Doesn’t Just Participate in Multiple Sports, She Excels in Them

Suzie Barnett is one of those people who makes the rest of us feel that, maybe--just maybe--when the shares of talent were being handed out, it wasn’t done in an extremely fair manner.

Most of us would like to be good--or at least not embarrassingly mediocre--at just one athletic endeavor. But Barnett moves fluidly through five sports and, despite little serious training, she excels at all.

Barnett, a senior at Villa Park High School, was last year’s Century League softball player of the year, and she set the Orange County home run record with 10. She batted .402 and led the county in runs scored (33) and RBIs (28). This year she is hitting .333, has 3 home runs and has struck out only twice in 61 at-bats.

She also was the varsity volleyball team’s most valuable player the past two seasons, playing middle blocker and averaging 15 kills a game.

During the 1987-88 girls’ soccer season, Barnett was Villa Park’s most valuable player; she played center forward, led the team in goals and was selected to the All-Century League first team.

And that was her first year of high school soccer. During her previous high school winter seasons, she played forward on the basketball team, averaging 19 points and 15 rebounds for two seasons.

Don’t forget track and field. For fun, Barnett goes out after softball practice, puts on her spikes and runs around the track. Fast.

Last year, she competed in only one regular-season meet and qualified for the Century League preliminaries in the 220. She won the preliminaries, then won the league final in 25.9 seconds, a school record.

“The coach asked me (to go out for track), and I thought it would be fun,” Barnett said. “I was kind of nervous.”

So far this year, Barnett has competed in one track meet, against El Modena. Without having run since last season, she showed up after softball practice, spent a few minutes figuring out how the starting blocks worked, then won the 100-yard dash in 11.6 seconds. She also won the 220 and placed second in the long jump.

“I wasn’t surprised she had talent,” Dick Brunt, Villa Park track coach, said. “But for her to be able to run such good times, without any kind of practice . . . There’s nothing in high school athletics Suzie couldn’t do.”

Barnett is entered in next Saturday’s Orange County Girls’ Track and Field Championships at UC Irvine in the 100, 220, long jump and 440 relay.

OK. So she’s a great athlete. Some kind of Renaissance jock. So some people are good at sports, and some people are good at other pursuits, such as academics.

But quick stereotypes and worn cliches don’t stick easily to Barnett, except perhaps the old adage “the more you do, the more you can do.”

Besides playing sports year-round, Barnett has a 3.9 grade-point average and is active in student government and community service organizations. But it isn’t easy to get that information out of Barnett, who covers her face and blushes when her mother, Barbara, mentions her daughter’s accomplishments.

“She has very little ego,” Brunt said. “She just kind of says ‘Gee whiz’ when she does something well.”

There’s one other little fact about Barnett that distinguishes her from many other outstanding athletes. She doesn’t want a college scholarship.

Barnett’s parents, her older sisters, Kathy and Kerry, and her older brother, Steve, all attended California. Not one to stray from the Bear pack, Barnett had always planned to attend Cal and eventually study law or medicine.

So, instead of waiting around for Cal to recruit her, Barnett recruited Cal. The Barnetts wrote a letter and sent tapes of Barnett’s performances in basketball, softball and volleyball to Berkeley. And, last summer, she met with the volleyball coach, Marlene Piper.

Piper started telling the Barnetts that she didn’t know if she had a scholarship available, but Suzie and her parents said, “Oh, that’s OK. Thank you, but we’re not interested in a scholarship. We just want to know if you’re interested in Suzie.”

Piper was interested. So Barnett’s application--which probably would have been accepted anyway--was tagged “recruited athlete,” making her admission that much more assured.

“I just didn’t want a scholarship,” Barnett said. “I didn’t want to be obligated to play. If sports interfered with my studies, I wanted to be able to stop.”

Her father, Larry, said: “They started telling her about the school, but they didn’t have to sell us. We’d picked the university; we were just looking for a sport. We used it as an enhancement to her application. And if she took a paid scholarship, then she would feel that she had to play.”

So Barnett plans to play volleyball at Cal, in part because the volleyball coach was the one who recruited her. She also has entertained thoughts of playing softball, as long as she can handle her class load.

“It’s going to be amazing to see what she can do when she concentrates on one sport,” Dave Shelton, Villa Park’s softball coach, said. “She’s a once-in-a-lifetime athlete.”

But Barnett just shrugs and blushes.

“I don’t really favor one sport over another,” she said. “I don’t know. It’s just fun.”