Coach’s Talent Pool for Seoul: Color It Orange

The last week in September, 11 countries and Orange County will go head-to-head in Seoul, South Korea, for the Olympic gold in water polo. Well, almost. Half of the U.S. players are from Orange County, as is the coach--especially the coach.

His name is Bill Barnett, and he coaches water polo and teaches math at Newport Harbor High School. When he was interviewed by CBS-TV during the 1988 Pan Am Games, the sportscaster--who had obviously done his homework--asked Barnett if he were out of the coaching mold of Bobby Knight, Indiana University’s volatile basketball coach. Several months later, overseeing a practice of his Olympic team at the Harbor High pool, Barnett was still aggrieved at the question. “I don’t see myself that way,” he said plaintively. “I don’t go around throwing chairs.”

A review of Times clips over the past decade, however, might lead one to disagree. He’s referred to repeatedly as a “drill sergeant” and a “tough disciplinarian” who has frequently had to deal with complaints from parents who say he is too rough on their teen-agers. But Barnett has consistently provided the one sure antidote to this kind of criticism: He wins.

In the 22 years he has coached water polo at Harbor High, Barnett has reached the California Interscholastic Federation 4-A finals 17 times and has won the state title 10 times. He is so universally respected in his field that, in 1984, he became the only high school coach to be appointed head coach of a U.S. 1988 Summer Olympic team.

I caught up with him recently at 7 a.m. at the Harbor High pool where he was preparing to put his charges through a routine Barnett three-hour workout. The team members--13 tall, lithe, tanned Californians and one import from Hawaii--were warming up, and Barnett climbed into the bleachers flanking the pool to talk. He is medium-sized, flat-bellied and walks with slightly hunched shoulders as if he’s in a perpetual hurry. His uniform of red swim trunks, red baseball cap, dark glasses, sandals and a whistle seem to be grafted on.

Sports Illustrated referred to him in a recent article as “taut and terse.” Terse he is, but taut he wasn’t--at least not on this day. His team had just taken four out of six exhibition matches from a touring Yugoslav team that will be one of the major U.S. opponents in Seoul, and Barnett was mellowed out. At least for Barnett.

He’s aware that water polo isn’t exactly crowding football and baseball as a major American sport, so he’s pleased at the exposure it will get to a huge American TV audience during the Olympics. “We’ve had competitive water polo programs in high school in California since the early 1930s,” he said, “but it’s never been very popular in other states, even where there were strong swimming programs. The main reason it’s been slow to grow is the reluctance of a lot of swimming coaches to let water polo get established. They just plain don’t want swimmers to play water polo. But that’s beginning to change. Now it’s starting to catch on all over the country.”

Until the last few years, the United States has never challenged for world leadership. The best it could do was a bronze medal in the 1972 Olympics. But the United States won a silver in 1984 and is now playing on a par with its three chief rivals: the Soviet Union, Italy and Yugoslavia. Only 12 water polo teams make the Olympics, and the United States qualified with a fourth-place finish in the 1986 world championships.

Barnett refuses to assess his team’s chances. “I predict we’ll arrive there on Sept. 14 and start play on the 21st,” he said tersely. “Beyond that, I don’t make predictions.”

He’s happy, however, to explain some of the finer points of water polo to those who may be watching the game for the first time simply because it’s an Olympic sport.

“Water polo,” he said, “is difficult to understand because there are so many whistles. There’s a lot of body contact, and the officials have to keep control, so they blow a lot of fouls. When a whistle blows, action continues, but the man committing the foul has to drop off the player he fouled and give him a free throw. If a player commits a major foul--like holding a man under water--he has to get out of the playing area for 35 seconds or until a goal is scored.

“Most of the scoring is done close to the goal as in basketball, which water polo resembles in many ways. The goalie can’t go beyond half-tank, and on offense we try to work it into the man in the center so he can draw a foul or pass it off to a swimmer cutting for the goal. The action never stops unless a player is ejected.”

The action also never stops at a Barnett practice. Even when he’s talking to a visitor, he knows exactly what is happening in the pool and sometimes he will break into the middle of an answer to shout at one of his swimmers (in his earlier days he was referred to as “Old Yeller”). He says he hasn’t had to adapt his style to the older swimmers who make up his Olympic squad because he spent seven years coaching the U.S. junior team and several more years assisting UC Irvine coach Ted Newland with the U.S. national team and knows most of the players very well. “I don’t yell at them as much as I do the high school players,” Barnett admitted.

He also said he often finds his drill-sergeant reputation helpful in keeping parents of players off his back. “I seldom hear from them directly,” he said, “because they’re intimidated by me--or rather by my reputation. But I don’t do it on purpose, and, of course, I don’t deserve it. I often wonder where they get these ideas.”

One place they get them is the regimen Barnett lays on his water polo players. His Olympic swimmers have been on a six-hour-a-day training schedule since early May, and his high school swimmers have to submit to a similar program that often starts with 6:45 a.m. workouts and ends with sessions from 3 to 6 p.m.. There is no off-season for Barnett. His swimmers work out five days a week throughout the year, and seem to thrive on it.

But Barnett, at 46, doesn’t ask anything of his players that he doesn’t ask of himself. In addition to his coaching duties, (water polo, frosh-soph swim team) he teaches four math classes a day (“I try not to be as tough on my math students”) and has served as a summer lifeguard in Newport Beach for almost two decades. Barnett lives in Laguna Beach, and his wife, Marcia, is--or was--a science teacher at Harbor High who got caught in a cutback crunch and is now looking for another teaching job. Barnett’s daughter, Meagan, 19, is at UCLA, and his son, Tyler, is in the seventh grade and “not big into swimming. He just kind of fools around a lot. He’s very independent, not intimidated.”

Barnett is a pragmatist who is more into performance than analysis. “I don’t know what motivates these kids,” he said. “They just like to swim. They’re good athletes who would probably excel in other sports, but it doesn’t work that way. You don’t see three-letter men in high school sports any more. It’s an age of specialization, and they’re not going to make the team if they spread it too thin.”

Barnett’s own specialization has severely limited his job market--in spite of his success and the enormous respect he’s earned in aquatics and water polo. “There aren’t a lot of positions open in this field,” he said. “I only applied for a college coaching job once, and then withdrew because they wouldn’t offer me a long-term contract.” He thought that over and smiled. “When you’re successful in this business,” he added, “you coach the Olympics.”