Gonzalez a Big Man on Campus : Water polo: Saddleback’s 6-4, 210-pound senior looks like he belongs on the football field, but he prefers to play in the pool.

He stands 6 feet 4 and weighs 210 pounds. When he walks across the campus at Saddleback High, he could be mistaken for one of the school’s biggest football players.

Maybe a defensive end.

But a chance meeting at the neighborhood pool when Julian Gonzalez was in elementary school changed his destiny. One of five children, Gonzalez found relief from the stifling Santa Ana summer heat by hanging out with his two older brothers at a city pool.

“One of the lifeguards noticed that my older brothers and me were always at the pool every day. We liked being in the water,” Gonzalez said. “He told us, ‘Why don’t you try water polo? You seem to love the water.’ ”

Since then, the Gonzalez family has provided a steady stream of top two-meter men to the water polo team at Saddleback.

Francisco Gonzalez, 22 and a delivery man for a department store chain, and his brother Sergio, 19 and a warehouse manager, were each standout players.

Julian Gonzalez is the best of the three, according to Roadrunner Coach Monte McCord. As a junior last season, he scored 100 goals, and, thanks to his size, is drawing major college interest.

With Gonzalez and Danny Noon, who had 96 goals in 1998, Saddleback has a shot at winning its first Golden West League water polo title.

“They are two of the better players in the county,” McCord said. “They provide us with scoring and you can count on either one to play [against] the better players of the other team and shut them down, or hold that person under wraps.”

Noon and Gonzalez trade off playing point man or in the hole.

“Julian has quick reactions and he knows what to do and when to do it,” Noon said.

The Gonzalez boys and Noon, who didn’t start playing water polo until his freshman year, said soccer, baseball and football ruled their neighborhood when they were kids. Julian Gonzalez said his father, Victor, forbade the boys from playing football.

“We grew up playing Little League,” Julian Gonzalez said. “Our father thought football was too dangerous.”

Julian Gonzalez chuckles when he relates how he came home from water polo practice one day with bruises all over his body.

“My dad, he knows how physical it really is, but he doesn’t want to look,” he said. “It gets really rough under the water.”

The fact the brothers had any time for sports is surprising. Julian said his father came to this country with a third-grade education and the determination to get ahead. While his background was in farming, Victor settled into building and repairing boats.

“He pretty much grew up on his knees, working,” Julian said.

Victor passed his work ethic down to his sons, and he fully expects his children to follow in his footsteps.

“He still has a problem with us playing sports to this day,” Julian said. “He wants us to be working. That’s the main reason I got a job last summer, so I could pay my way to the Junior Olympics because we didn’t have enough money at home to pay for my trip.”

Gonzalez also is determined to leave his mark at Saddleback.

“We have a large Hispanic population,” he said of his school. “Not a lot of families are exposed to water sports. It’s more the experience of soccer and land sports that you see around here. It’s the culture.

“I get along fine with the football players and the coaches ask me if I will come out and play football, but I won’t.”

McCord said Gonzalez, the tallest of the brothers by several inches, has a good chance of advancing to the next level. Sergio tried playing water polo at Orange Coast College last year but broke a hand and had to find work while he recovered.

Julian has several goals. A league title would be nice. “This year we feel we have a chance, but we can’t take Tustin lightly,” he said.

As for the next level, “Hopefully, I will make it,” he said. “I’d be the first member of my family to do that. My parents never made it past fifth grade. They’re real strict on the education part because they don’t want me to miss an opportunity.”