Good luck to former Panther Le'roy Barnes as he competes at Madison Square Garden for an NCAA Division I National Championship for the Mizzou Tigers!



COLUMBIA — Before his collegiate wrestling career started, Le’Roy Barnes decided to quit.

Tired of the preseason training in the 100-degree Kansas heat, the Missouri redshirt senior wrestler, then a freshman at Neosho Community College, walked in to coach Wayne Peterson’s office. He was fed up with the training, sick of running in the muggy humidity and completely over wrestling.

“I was just done,” Barnes recalled. “I made up in my mind that this was not for me. I could just go to school and be a regular student.”

After talking to coaches back home in Belton, Missouri, he asked for a second chance at Neosho.

He got one.

That season, Barnes finished third in 133-pounds at the National Junior College Athletics Association Championships. The next year, he returned as a captain and won the junior college national championship in that same weight class.

This season, the Missouri redshirt senior is heading to the NCAA Wrestling Championships in the 157-pound weight class — one he didn't anticipate having to compete in.

In those first two years away from home, Barnes had to mature. Fast. He went from a quitter to a captain and from dreading team runs in the Kansas heat to leading them. As he's matured, Barnes has learned how to make those changes.

Barnes’ Twitter handle, @ChampionAdjust, sums up the senior’s mindset towards wrestling and life: When things don’t go your way, you make it work.

After losing the 141-pound starting job to redshirt junior Matt Manley, Barnes didn’t try to argue his way into a starting job.

He simply made a statement to coach Brian Smith.

“I’m going 157 for the team.”

There was no complaining. No quarreling. Smith expected the redshirt senior to yell at him following the decision to start Manley, but Barnes' maturity tends to reveal itself in difficult times.

“Coach Smith made the right choice,” Barnes said. “He knows what he’s doing, but I told him, ‘I just want to know what I can fix, what I can do to give myself the best opportunity to be the guy.’”

He’ll travel to New York City this weekend for the NCAA national tournament at Madison Square Garden, a final showing for the senior who jumped two weight classes and ended up winning the Mid-American Conference title.

“Is (his Twitter handle) perfect or what?” Smith said. “The champion adjusted. He goes and wins the 157-pound MAC championship. That’s his attitude in life. If you can’t do it, you adjust and find a way to do it.”

The Twitter handle idea came his freshman year of high school, when he first started wrestling. Barnes had no idea what he was doing on the mat. He knew he was athletically gifted, but the freshman didn’t know the difference between a take-down and a level change.

“He stuck with that 'champions adjust (mentality),'” Peterson said. “That’s his deal. He’s had to adjust. He lost seven matches his first semester sophomore year and won the national championship.”

When he came to Missouri as a transfer his junior year, Barnes tore his ACL on the final day of preseason workouts. He spoke with Smith, who told him he could redshirt to save his two remaining years of eligibility and began rehab immediately. The day of Barnes’ surgery, he showed up to practice post-procedure on a pair of crutches and with a brace around his right knee.

Barnes sat sidelined for an entire season and watched teammates take each other down on the practice mat, play kickball before practice and battle for dual victories.

“The big adjustment for him at Mizzou was being able to deal with not being the No. 1 guy,” said Justin Wisdom, one of Barnes’ high school coaches. “To grow as a person, a man and an athlete, dealing with not being the spotlight guy, that was tough for him.”

He’s still not the spotlight guy on Missouri. Seven of Missouri’s nine wrestlers competing in New York are top-16 seeds, but Barnes did not make the list. He drew No. 5 seed Dylan Palacio from Cornell University in the opening round, a wrestler he lost to in January.

Just has he did as a sophomore in junior college, his expectation is to win a national title.

“If you’re at 157 pounds,” Peterson said, “you don’t want to be wrestling Le’Roy Barnes right now.”


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