John David Barnett

David Barnett considers himself lucky. Not everyone finds his passion, after all. “My hope for my kids is that they find their ‘thing.’ There’s no guarantee you’ll find it. People don’t find it all the time.”

He and his wife, Heather, have three children — Wesley, 15, Grace, 13, and May, 11. “It doesn’t matter if it’s sports or your profession or your spouse, you’re lucky if you find your passion. The thing. And then once you find it, it becomes so much easier to implement.”

For Barnett, he found his passion playing tennis with his parents and four older siblings on the courts around tiny Friona, Texas, and he has been playing ever since.

At the age of 16 he broke the ranks of the Top 20 in the Lone Star state. His talent and dedication afforded him opportunities to travel all around for junior tennis tournaments and camps.

He says all this, even as his cool demeanor and even tone belie a thirst for competition that drives him still.

At 42, he plays every week in a competitive league he sussed out when he and Heather and the family moved to her hometown, Little Rock, from the Dallas/Fort Worth metroplex about 12 years ago.

Carter Fairley of Little Rock met Barnett on a tennis court not long after that, and they struck up a friendship because of their similarities.

“We’re both reasonably dry and very detail-oriented and very plain-spoken. I really think the world of David,” Fairley says. “Everything he does he works really hard at and he’s very good at.”

Fairley attends St. James United Methodist Church with Barnett, a senior vice president with Morgan Stanley, and turns to him for investment advice.

“He’s also my broker,” Fairley says. “I value his professional opinion as much as I do his friendship.”

Barnett is a level 5.0 in the United States Tennis Association’s National Tennis Rating Program. World-class players are at level 6.5-7.0.

“Which,” Fairley points out, “is just a point below many of these players who are playing in the [Bolo Bash] tournament.”

This week, the 2-year-old tennis wing of the annual Baptist Health Foundation fundraiser Bolo Bash kicked off the U.S. Tennis Association Men’s Pro Circuit Tournament at Rebsamen Tennis Center, presented by Standard Business Systems. It continues through Sunday, and Wednesday is a special Kids Day sponsored by Delta Dental, capped off by a match at 6 p.m.

Barnett is the tournament’s chairman.

“David is so competitive on the tennis court and so aggressive, he is the first person of all my friends and tennis acquaintances that I play with that I could say would intentionally try to hit you with a ball. He would not do it with the intent to injure, but he would do it to show that he is that skilled.”

Greg Fess met Barnett on the court as well, and they’re both fathers of competitive players. He agrees, “David is a tenacious competitor,” but in a way that’s fun to be around, and maybe that’s an ingredient in the recipe for his son’s success.

At 15, Wes Barnett is already ranked No. 1 in Arkansas and in the national Top 100 for his age group.

“This thing I do with Baptist isn’t a have-to. It’s a natural. You’re not going to find 10 of those things. You’re going to find two or three things that you have a passion for and that aren’t work.”

Barnett relishes the time he spends in the car with Wes on the way to and from tennis tournaments between Little Rock and Hilton Head, S.C., once and sometimes twice a month.

“A lot of people say, ‘I can’t believe you drive eight hours to Mobile, Ala., on Friday and come back on Sunday.’ But that’s time with him,” Barnett says. “Most of it is silent but you get that 30 to 45 minutes where you really get something and that’s invaluable.”

Barnett is chairman of the Arkansas Junior Tennis Council, a group he has been involved with for three years, promoting and engaging junior players across the state. That led him to a more recent partnership with Baptist Health and the Baptist Health Foundation, which took over the 36-year-old Pro Circuit tournament two years ago.

The tournament has already surpassed its initial fundraising goal (it’s at about $140,000). The money is directed to Baptist Health College, providing nursing scholarships and continuing education for nurses.

Fess was chairman of the tournament in 2012 and 2013, when it was presented by CHI St. Vincent, and he encouraged Barnett to take on that role.

“I felt like he would be a good leader and someone who would help us keep growing the tournament, and he was really the perfect guy to help us transition to Baptist Health,” Fess says.

Bolo Bash is a qualifying tournament, with about 100 players from 89 countries trying to play well enough here to rise to more competitive, higher-profile tournaments along the coasts.

TIME AWAY FROM WORK

Missy Lewis, chief development officer for the Baptist Health Foundation, says Barnett played a critical role in Baptist’s effort to strike a balance for an event that can be appreciated by tennis enthusiasts and casual spectators alike.

“If you go to the U.S. Open you see that people want to come to an outing. They want to see a really cool sport being played, and we’ll surround it with a lot of really good stuff going on,” Lewis says.

Former professional player Lindsay Davenport, ranked as the No. 1 player in the world on eight occasions and winner of 55 Women’s Tennis Association singles titles and the gold medal at the 1996 Summer Olympics, hosted a clinic and gave a talk Friday.

From Barnett’s perch, Davenport and the tournament serve to invite young people into the sport, and in a meaningful way. They can mingle with pros.

Meanwhile, two matches will be played at night so adults who work or go to school during the day can watch.

“And remember that some of these players that have come through here are now Hall of Famers — Andre Agassi, Andy Roddick, Kei Nishikori, Donald Young …”

The tournament has been held for the past few years at Pleasant Valley Country Club but is returning this year to Rebsamen Tennis Center, with its resurfaced courts, new nets and windscreens, and some grounds work, he says. (For a schedule of events, go to bolobashtennis.com.)

Lewis was so impressed with Barnett that she asked him to serve on the Baptist Health Foundation’s board of trustees. His term began in January.

Barnett “protects” his time — he consciously chooses that phrase — and invests it wisely in the things he cares about.

“This thing I do with Baptist isn’t a have-to. It’s a natural,” he says. “You’re not going to find 10 of those things. You’re going to find two or three things that you have a passion for and that aren’t work.”

His crisp white shirt and perfectly creased suit pants will be replaced with sweats or shorts as soon as his work day ends and his task of shuttling children to after-school activities begins. He left a position with Ernst and Young’s corporate finance division in 2004 to move to Little Rock to make that part of his day possible.

“If there were basketball games or track meets or tennis tournaments, you would look in the stands and there would be four people and two of them were always my parents,” he says of Wesley and Doris Barnett, a farmer and a stay-at-home mother back home in Friona. “At the end of the day I wanted to have something, a profession, where I could live in a city where I could be one of those parents who were there and active because I think that’s important.”

He still travels for business on occasion, but his trips are shorter and far less frequent than they were with Ernst and Young.

“I got to do work with the New York Yankees, the Dallas Mavericks … it was a lot of variety, a lot of big names and we would consult for whatever they needed, so I got to travel and kind of see the world and kind of see the business aspect of it as a consultant,” he says. “I did that for six or seven years and it was a good time to do that because I could travel and work all the time. As I started moving up the corporate ladder I realized this was going to be a tough profession.”

FAMILY SET

Barnett’s older brother, Ricky, says Barnett hasn’t changed much. They talk a couple of times a week and the whole family gets together a couple of times a year. “He always did what you’re supposed to do. A really good child, a really good student, really competitive. … He would tell me, ‘One of these days I’m going to beat you and you’re never going to beat me again.’ Once he got old enough to take me, I’ve spent the last 25 years trying to beat him.”

He has always wanted to do things a little differently, too, says big brother. “We all graduated from Texas Tech — our parents and all four of the older children. He was not going to Tech.”

Barnett chose Texas Christian University in Fort Worth, where he finished a bachelor’s degree in math and a master’s degree in business administration. It’s also where he met his wife, so doing things a little differently proved fruitful.

“I didn’t know anybody at TCU but I liked the size and I liked the location,” he says. “I had looked at Texas and Texas A&M and there were dorms bigger than my small town. It was more liberal and bigger than I thought I was going to be used to, so TCU really fit.”

After moving to Little Rock, he helped kick off a program through Highland Valley United Methodist Church to help homeless families get back on their feet. He served food to the families who stayed overnight at the church, spent the night at the church with them and played with their kids.

“The goal was to get them back on their feet, and that usually happened,” he says. “It was very humbling and it made you appreciate things because people are not too far away from that most of the time; you just don’t know it.”

He also had a place on the board and as a mentor with Big Brothers Big Sisters of Central Arkansas.

“I had three brothers and one sister so I knew the value of having someone to look up to and someone to guide you,” he says.

Barnett finds his role as adjunct professor of statistics at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock rewarding as well.

“It’s rewarding to me because it comes naturally to me and it typically doesn’t to most,” says Barnett, whose father was a math major, too. “The kids that I teach are night students. It’s typically a working mother or the person who went into the military, or it’s somebody who had trouble all through college and they’re coming back to do it the hard way. I didn’t do it that way.”

He sees a common thread in all of these things. They all allow him to pay it forward.

“What I try to do is to think, ‘What helped me growing up?’ and then give back,” he says. “It turns out a lot of my energy and time and passion really revolves around the benefits that I got growing up in a small town and having the ability to have a good upbringing.”