Barkley always wants to take it to next level

The sandy-haired boy trudged from the shore toward his father’s car, tears pooling in his eyes after enduring one of the greater injustices in his 12-year life.

He was leaving the beach near Peninsula Park after a Saturday of football conditioning.

“What’s wrong?” his father asked.

“Coach said because it’s my first year, I have to play on the offensive line,” he sniffed.

And that was how Matt Barkley almost started his football career as a lineman.

“I’m naturally a pretty big kid,” said Barkley, now 17 years old and 6-foot-5 and 225 pounds. “I was a little chubby, but just bigger than normal for most of the kids on the team. And I was a year younger, too, so he tried to put me at lineman. I just broke down, like, no, that’s not me, I’m not going to do that.”

This is the same Matt Barkley who started at quarterback on Mater Dei High’s varsity team as a freshman. As a junior this year, he’s been rated as one of the nation’s top college football prospects.

Yeah. That guy.

Barkley had tried out for quarterback of the Newport-Mesa Junior All-American Seahawks with the other would-be signal callers. He’d been working with the team’s offensive coordinator, Brent Melbon, now the secondary coach at Orange Coast College, for a few days.

Then came the edict from head coach Rich Sorensen, followed by Barkley’s tear-up. Barkley, Sorensen said, couldn’t be quarterback because it was his first year.

He was crushed.

Barkley had always looked up to John Elway, not the five beefy guys blocking for him.

Melbon lobbied Sorensen for more time to evaluate Barkley, which led to an argument between the two friends.

But Melbon convinced Sorensen to start Barkley anyhow, and the Monarch’s latest freak of nature never played a game on the offensive line.

When Barkley entered the tutelage of Bruce Rollinson, the head football coach at Mater Dei High, the Monarchs’ skipper didn’t hesitate to start Barkley.

In 19 years as a head coach, Rollinson had never started a freshman at varsity quarterback, he said. Even former Monarch and 2004 Heisman trophy winner Matt Leinart didn’t start a high school varsity game until his junior year.

Leinart was the Arizona Cardinals’ starting quarterback until he landed on the team’s injured reserve list Oct. 9 because of a broken collarbone.

“We went through the growth pains of having a freshman quarterback,” Rollinson said. “But he did some special things and we saw the potential there.”

The Monarchs were 9-4 Barkley’s freshman year and finished 4-1 in the Serra League as Barkley threw for 1,685 yards and ten touchdowns. He was 126 for 220 attempts and had nine interceptions.

Now a junior at Mater Dei (Santa Ana), Barkley has already become the third quarterback — after Billy Blanton, a Costa Mesa resident, and Matt Leinart — in the school’s 57-year history to surpass 5,000 passing yards. He’s the first to start as a freshman at Mater Dei since Todd Marinovich did in 1983.

What’s more, there have been rumblings that Barkley could join the Monarchs’ history books as the third alumnus to win the Heisman trophy. If he did, he would join Leinart and John Huarte, who graduated in 1961 and won as Notre Dame’s quarterback in 1964.

With that kind of buzz surrounding Matt, the Barkleys have grown accustomed to the phone ringing for their eldest son. Usually, it’s staffers from college recruiting websites calling to ask about Barkley’s current height and weight, what music he uses to pump himself up, and — the real kicker — if he’s committed to a school yet.

He hasn’t.

But Barkley was still surprised when Colorado Coach Dan Hawkins offered him a scholarship in the spring. Hawkins was the first coach to offer him one in person.

Since then, the offers have created a new standard of normalcy. Barkley has scholarship offers from countless Division I programs, but he said he’s narrowed his scope down to USC, Oregon, and Cal.

“On Sept. 1, he had a college scholarship offer from every major college or university in the United States,” Rollinson said. “You name it, he’s got it.”

His cousin and best friend, senior Monarchs wide receiver Robbie Boyer, was offered a scholarship to Harvard.

“I always wanted to play quarterback, and he played receiver,” Barkley said. “From early on, there was always a connection, a cousin connection. We were on the same page.”

Barkley grew up in south Irvine, before his parents moved to a gated community not far from Newport Beach Country Club, where Boyer also lives.

The house, a two-story traditional, features black-and-white photos of Barkley and his siblings, Sam and Laney, at various stages in their lives. A 2007 Mater Dei football poster marks the entry to the family room and kitchen. Barkley’s father, Les, pulled out the family photo albums to show off pictures of the cousins together at the beach.

As the end of the regular season approached, the prospect of not throwing to Boyer anymore ran through his mind more frequently, Barkley said. He’s hoping he’ll get to pass to another family member, his brother Sam, now a freshman wide receiver, before finishing his career at Mater Dei.

“It’ll be weird,” Barkley said, thinking about life without Boyer, his go-to receiver. Boyer leads the team in receptions this year with 46 for 830 yards and 13 touchdowns.

In five years of playing football, Barkley has never known a time when he wasn’t starting. But that will likely change in 2009, when he’ll become one weapon in an arsenal of quarterbacks, depending on where he attends college.

“The programs that we’re talking about, the competition is going to be very stiff,” Rollinson said. “At USC, you’ve got Sanchez, they’ve got three or four guys. Matt’s not afraid of competition. He knows he’s going to have to compete when you start throwing out names like Florida, and Tennessee and whatever other school you want to mention.”

Barkley’s focus is the same as it’s always been: narrow.

Unlike most of his cohorts, Barkley doesn’t have a Facebook page or an instant messenger screen name. Barkley briefly had a MySpace page, but only because it was created by an impostor. After weeks of trying to prove to the site’s administrators he wasn’t the page’s creator, MySpace eventually removed it from the social networking website.

“Once that started [my parents] did a good job of keeping me on track,” Barkley said. “I never got into that, or even AIM. I’ve never had MySpace, or stuff like that. Not that they’re bad, but even at Mater Dei, the deans, the superintendents, they’ll look at kids’ MySpaces. I’ve heard that college coaches will search for prospects just to see what they’re like off the field.”

Barkley enters the quarterfinal round of the CIF Southern Section Division Pac-5 playoffs against Crespi Friday after finishing the regular season 179 for 271for 2,992 yards and 31 touchdowns.

It was no surprise to Rollinson.

“We’re going to ride his right arm to the playoffs,” the gravelly voiced coach said midway through the season.

The Monarchs (9-1), were ranked No. 7 in the country by USA Today. They dropped to No. 19 after a 31-12 Trinity League loss to Orange Lutheran Nov. 2.

Mater Dei held steady at No. 19 after Week 9, when the Monarchs defeated Servite, 38-13, Nov. 9. Barkley threw for 348 yards and three touchdowns before a crowd of 26,000 at Angel Stadium.

Barkley copies Peyton Manning in his driven pursuit of perfection, but his ability to keep cool under pressure has the markings of Tom Brady, currently his favorite NFL quarterback.

“He wants every pass perfect,” Rollinson said. “Everything isn’t always perfect. It’s something we kind of feed, but at times, we say, you’re gonna make mistakes, and that’s OK. As a football coach, you want every kid to want to be perfect every play, but it’s not an obsession. He doesn’t dwell on it, and if he does, I humor him out of it.”

Barkley agreed.

“I’ve tried to do that in all my sports, just work harder than everyone else,” he said. “I don’t like to settle for anything less than what I’m capable of.”

SORAYA NADIA McDONALD may be reached at (714) 966-4613 or at soraya.mcdonald@latimes.com. SORAYA NADIA McDONALD may be reached at (714) 966-4613 or at soraya.mcdonald@latimes.com.