Born to Versatility : High schools: The latest to bear the Magdaleno name at Santa Paula excels in three sports and in the classroom.

Mark Magdaleno was playing baseball for Westmont College and he would sometimes take his nephews, Dustin and Joey, to the college on weekends.

“They’d sleep in the dorms with me and get up and go do the doubleheader,” recalled Mark, now the baseball coach at Santa Paula High. “They’d be in their uniforms and they’d be our bat boys.”

Once, while Joey sat in the dugout and watched the game, Mark lost track of Dustin. When he found him, the 5-year-old was in the bullpen with the pitchers, trying out their chewing tobacco.

“That’s a true story,” Mark said, laughing. “I mean, he was a player .”

Dustin, now a senior at Santa Paula, has grown into a true player, and he looms large in the school’s athletic annals.

As a football player, Magdaleno was a multipurpose tailback who set an all-time Ventura County record with 138 catches.

As a soccer player, he started at forward on a Southern Section championship team as a freshman, was chosen All-Southern Section three times and was a four-time all-league selection.

And as a baseball player, he has a school-record 72 stolen bases--also believed to be a county record. (Ventura County has no official record of career stolen bases.) Further, Dustin Magdaleno--playing for his uncle Mark--is bent on bringing Santa Paula its first baseball playoff victory since 1941.

Dustin Magdaleno is a player off the fields too; his 3.76 grade-point average ranks him sixth in the senior class. In addition, a part-time job with the Santa Paula Parks and Recreation Department enables him to spend summers and vacations helping the youth of his hometown.

Early exposure to tobacco might be the only vice one can pin on Dustin. And he has not dared try a dip since.

Schoolwork? It’s not something that gets in Magdaleno’s way, to be avoided like some swarming linebacker. Rather, he hits the books as he hits the basepaths: all out.

“There are things you’ve got to do and going to school is one thing you’ve got to do,” he said. “You go to school to do your work, and when I’m in the classroom I sit and do my work. It’s just the way my parents brought me up.”

Magdaleno (5-foot-9, 165 pounds) knows that these are the salad days, when life’s cares are little more than hitting a curve and rocketing a ball past a diving goalie. And he knows that these days are transitory.

“I like high school and I don’t want to leave it,” he said. “I have a sister coming in and I tell her, you better enjoy it, because it goes by fast. I don’t want to leave. . . . I have a lot of fun.”

Magdaleno might never leave Santa Paula, pop. 24,500, a bucolic town on the back roads of Ventura County where snow-splotched hills and blooming orange groves serve as a backdrop to the ball field.

“It’s nice. It’s a small town and everybody knows everybody,” he said, smiling through braces. “It’s just a great place to live. It’s a beautiful town, there are no big buildings and there’s a lot of historical monuments out there. I’ve been down to L.A. and it looks like you might get lost out there. I see some of the schools and their playgrounds are just concrete.”

“Out here, it’s a lot of grass.”

And a lot of Magdalenos. Dustin’s mother Amparo attended Santa Paula High before her children, growing up in the same small town with her 19 brothers and sisters. His father Joe, the school’s soccer coach, is by all accounts the family’s best athlete. His brother Joe, a soccer player at Cal State L.A., played tailback at Santa Paula and wore the same No. 26 from 1985-87.

Dustin Magdaleno will follow his brother to college. Despite Magdaleno’s size, the football coaches at Cal Lutheran and Redlands have assured him that he can fit into their plans.

Magdaleno’s quickness is prized. Most of his 138 catches were nothing more than screen passes and flare-outs predicated on his ability to break loose in the open field, a wall of blockers leading the way.

His record-breaking catch was typical. After tying the mark on a 15-yard out pattern, Magdaleno broke from the huddle.

“They threw me the bread and butter,” Magdaleno said. “The screen left. I caught that and ran about 20 yards.”

Magdaleno does not doubt his own ability to play at the college level. He will choose between Cal Lutheran and Redlands and play baseball and football.

“I have some good moves, I think,” he said. “I evade a lot. I like to evade the tacklers.”

There is nothing evasive in Santa Paula football Coach Mike Tsoutsouvas’ assessment of Magdaleno. Tsoutsouvas recalled a time in practice when the Cardinals ran a failed misdirection play and Dustin returned to the huddle.

“He looks at me and he says, ‘You know what, Coach?,’ ” Tsoutsouvas said. “He says, ‘This play, Coach . . . when it works, it really works. But when it doesn’t, it really doesn’t.”

Tsoutsouvas roared with laughter at the memory. “The kid was just so sincere ,” he said.

Magdaleno won the Ventura Star-Free Press/Thom McAn Scholar Athlete Award last fall, given to the outstanding football player-scholar in Ventura County. In Tsoutsouvas’ letter of recommendation, he noted that Magdaleno should be honored not just for his accomplishments as one of the school’s finest athletes in its 80-year history, “but for his character and qualities as a person.”

Magdaleno, a leadoff hitter and left fielder, hopes to cap his career at Santa Paula by helping the Cardinals to win a baseball playoff game for the first time since 1941.

The football team won the Frontier League championship last fall, and the soccer team, in his four years, won the Southern Section 1-A title in 1988 and advanced to at least the quarterfinals in two other seasons.

The baseball team is hardly a juggernaut: 4-5 in league play, battling 3-6-1 Calabasas for the league’s third playoff berth. Santa Paula will play host to Calabasas on Friday. If the Cardinals win, a postseason appearance is assured. Magdaleno is upbeat about the challenge.

“I think we’re going to do it,” he said. “We’re excited. I’m not just saying that. We really are and we can’t wait for our next game.”

Rest assured that Magdaleno will kick up some dirt on the basepaths. He has been thrown out just six times in 78 stolen-base attempts over the past three seasons. He is batting .370 this season with eight doubles, two triples and 20 stolen bases. But even a walk will suit his coach.

“It’s getting to the point where he is almost a legitimate triple for us every time he gets on,” Mark Magdaleno said.

Dustin Magdaleno doesn’t know half-speed. He was out with the baseball team recently over spring break, taking extra swings late into the afternoon after a morning practice.

He is ordinary people with extraordinary perspective.

“Yeah, you bet,” Mark Magdaleno said. “The youth of America is still strong.”