His Competitive Spirit Keeps Buena Park’s Barrios Playing Many Sports

The best athlete at Buena Park High School is a 6-foot-1 1/2, 205-pound, 16-year-old junior named Angel Barrios. And he’s everything a coach--or coaches--could want.

Barrios plays football in the fall, basketball in the winter and, last year, ran track and played baseball in the spring.

He also likes playing volleyball and lifting weights and swimming, but he has to rest occasionally, so he saves those pursuits for the off-season.

Which is when?

Just a sec, he’s thinking.

Since he was in elementary school, Barrios has tried to wedge as many sports as possible into his schedule.

For Barrios, football season merged into basketball, which merged into baseball, which merged back into football in a seemingly endless rotation.

He has always loved best the sport he was playing at the time. And he always said the sport he was playing was his best, and the most difficult to master, and the one he didn’t want to end.

The bottom line is that Barrios has excelled in whatever he has tried.

Last spring, he batted .300 and played center field, and ran the 100- and 220-yard dashes and the 440 and mile relays.

Last fall, he gained 1,065 yards as a football running back, earning all-Freeway League honors.

This winter, he’s a starting forward on the basketball team, which has a 10-6 record.

“He’s tremendous,” said Ed Matillo, basketball coach. “He never misses a beat. It’s amazing. Coaches tell me it must be nice to have a football player on the basketball team. But I don’t see it that way. I see a basketball player who also happens to play football and baseball and runs track.”

How does Barrios do it all? And so well?

“Maybe because I’m so competitive,” he said. “I want to win. Maybe that gets me going or something.

“It’s just something I do. I might get lazy, get a little fat (if he didn’t play year-round). I don’t want to do that. I want to keep active.”

If it sounds as if there’s no big secret locked away inside that burly frame, maybe it’s because there isn’t.

Better to ask how he fits four sports into three seasons.

Summers give him the most trouble. Then, every sport is in season.

One typical summer day looked like this:

8-10 a.m.: football practice.

10-noon: basketball practice.

Evening: either football or basketball game. Sometimes both.

“Toward the end of that summer, I got burned out,” said Barrios, who now has his coaches’ permission to miss occasional summer league practices or games.

But that didn’t stop him from attempting two sports, baseball and track, in one season.

“Friends thought I was crazy for trying it,” he said.

A sample week:

Monday: an hour workout on the track, then a quick change to join baseball practice in progress.

Tuesday: no track, just baseball.

Wednesday: baseball game.

Thursday: track meet.

Friday: baseball game.

Saturday and Sunday: sleep.

Now, he’s thinking of skipping track to concentrate on baseball.

The transition from sport to sport is the toughest part of juggling four, Barrios said.

“I wish I had a little more time to prepare,” he said. “Like maybe if I had a month for basketball and a month for baseball. And maybe a week off to rest, too.”

Barrios said the move from winter to spring is the most difficult.

“I have to start going to the batting cages once a week on weekends to get my hand-eye coordination back,” he said. “Baseball’s the toughest mentally (to prepare for).”

That’s not to say he’s ready to swear off his hectic rotation. Pressed to pick a favorite sport, he wavers.

“Oh, wow,” he said. “People always ask me. I sit and wonder. Dang. That’s a tough one to say. Football or basketball. Either one of those. It’s tough to decide.”

So he doesn’t.