Barnett Has Talent, but No Big Advantage : Water polo: Olympic coach relies on homework and discipline to prepare his team for the tough competition in Barcelona.

Imagine you are Chuck Daly, coach of the U.S. Olympic men’s basketball team. Your team is loaded with the best talent in the world. No problems, right?

Now imagine you’re Daly but most of your opponents are also stocked with Michael Jordan, Magic Johnson and Charles Barkley types.

Oh, boy.

It’s a scenario not very different than the one facing Bill Barnett, coach of the U.S. Olympic water polo team. In water polo, one of the most competitively balanced international sports, the U.S. has no monopoly on talent. Experts say no fewer than seven teams have a solid chance at advancing to the gold-medal match Aug. 9 in Barcelona.

There may be no coach more aware of what it will take for the U.S. to win its first Olympic water polo gold medal of the modern era than Barnett, who has been through it before, leading the U.S. to a silver medal at the 1988 Games.

“There’s so many intangible things,” Barnett said. “What referees you have, which referee starts on which side of the pool--a tremendous amount of intangible things, and there’s nothing you can do about it.”

But those who know Barnett know he’s a coach who leaves as little to chance as possible. He has become legendary in water polo circles for the notes about opponents he provides his players before each match.

“Everything we do is well thought out,” said John Vargas, a player on the national team. “I connect it to John Wooden’s theory of the pyramid. He has all these little things that build up to one big deal. That’s the way Barnett coaches.”

Or as Ted Newland, UC Irvine coach, and a longtime friend of Barnett’s, tells it: “He has the ability to zero in on what needs to be done. He’s very goal oriented and he can build a team up to where it has a chance to be a winner.”

Barnett’s style can be intimidating. With a voice as rough as any old-time football coach, Barnett fills the air around the pool deck with pointed directions.

“He’s used a few swear words at us but I’m a big boy, I can handle that,” Vargas said. “He’s doing everything for our well being. He wants to make us better players. Some guys can’t handle that and those guys aren’t on the team.”

Barnett said: “You’ve got to be true to your personality and whatever your personality is that’s what you have to do. Whether you’re soft-spoken or whether you’re like Bobby Knight who yells and screams a lot, you can still get the same result. You just simply demand it of the players.

“I’m more toward the hardliners--more toward the volatile situation.”

It’s hard to quibble with success.

In 26 years as coach at Newport Harbor, Barnett has led the Sailors to 10 Southern Section titles--a feat unmatched by any coach--and reached the championship match 17 times.

In 1977, Barnett was coach of the first U.S. junior program, which has helped develop most of the players on the American national team.

After the 1984 Olympics, he was voted the coach of the national team, and in 1988, he led the team to its second consecutive silver-medal finish.

Last summer, he guided the U.S. to the FINA World Cup championship, the country’s first major international title of the modern era. Barnett was named the outstanding coach of the World Cup, another first for an American in a major tournament.

Barnett, 49, would like to stay on as the national team’s coach for another four years and finish his international career in 1996 in front of the home fans in Atlanta.

But first there’s the matter of the seven matches in August that stand between the U.S. and the Olympic gold medal. The last time the Americans won the gold was in 1904 in St. Louis, but the all three teams that competed then were American club teams.

You can bet it won’t be as easy this time.