Date of birth: May 4, 1983
Age: 25
Place of birth: Mexico City, Mexico
Residence: Estado de Mexico, Mexico
Marital status: Married
Ethnic origin: Mexican
Style: Karate-Do
School: Top Team Martial Arts Studio
Instructor: Jacob Tapia and Oscar Barrientos
Year started in martial arts: 1989
Year received black belt :1993
Team: Top Team
Sport karate coach: Jacob Tapia
Favorite technique: Any standing kicks
Sport karate titles:
2007 - Women’s Japanese Forms World Champion
2005 - Women’s Japanese Forms World Champion
2002 - Women’s Japanese Forms World Champion
2000 - 15-17 Girls’ Creative Forms World Champion
Toughest forms/weapons opponent: Casey Marks
Toughest fighting opponent: (when she used to fight) Keriann McNulty
Sport karate career highlight: Being the first Mexican female to win a world title
Martial arts goal #1: To be the Mexican who has won the most titles
Martial arts goal #2: To win 3 or more Japanese titles in a row
Non-martial arts goal: To graduate from college and become a mom (someday far off)
Favorite tournament: Mexican Open and Super Grands
Favorite Super Grands: Buffalo 2006
Favorite sport karate players:
Past fighting: Eboni Adams
Past forms: Butch Togisala and Juancho Rodriguez
Present fighting: Oscar Barrientos
Present forms: Mia Caldwell
Most admired martial artists: Roberto Perez and Sergio Cabrales Moreno
Most admired persons: Her parents, brother and husband. Oscar Barrientos, Judith Andrade, Oscar Barrientos and Jacob Tapia
Favorite food: Cherries and chocolate
Favorite movie: The Godfather trilogy, Scarface and the Shinning
Favorite actor: Al Pacino
Favorite book: The Phicologist
Favorite music: Trance, salsa, cumbia
Favorite hobby: Sleep, eat and dance
Favorite sports: Martial arts and gymnastics
Address: Hacienda San Miguel 38-c Lomas de la Hacienda, Atizapan de Zaragoza, 52925, EM, Mexico
Phone No: (011) 525-551-325-24-45
Email: danneira@hotmail.com

Leafing through the pages of old Sport Karate Magazines can be quite entertaining. There’s where you get a chance to see veteran players in their younger less fortunate years with uniforms of ancient origin, hair styles that now embarrass them and placements in divisions that sometimes you wonder if it wasn’t really a print error. Issue #52 (we’re now at #97) was March/May 1996 and this contains the first entry for placing at the Super Grands by Daniela Barrientos, taking a respectable fifth place in seventeen and under girls’ creative/musical forms at Super Grands 6 in San Antonio, Texas. To give you an idea how far back that really is in sport karate years, in the same issue you find Joshua Durbin winning first place in 6 and under novice creative forms!!

As a young teenaged blackbelt from Mexico, Daniela was enthralled with the competition, idolizing her nemesis, Eboni Adams who was champion of both junior girls forms and fighting at the time. Barrientos hailed from the Okinawa-Te Karate team under Sergio Cabrales in Mexico City. They were an enormous entity from Mexico at the time and were the Super Grands’ largest Mexican supporter.

It was two years later when Barrientos and her team converged upon the Super Grands again, this time in Colorado Springs, Colorado. Believe it or not, Daniela used to fight and that year she again took a fifth place, but it was in fighting that time. And while she attended the next two World Games she stumbled along in forms and fighting still failing to win a belt in any event. But it was at one of these early Super Grands when the famed Guatemalan Team was winning in nearly everything that she happened across their coach Erick Schumann. He explained to her that winning is accomplished through mental attitude. If you believe you’re going to win each time you compete, then eventually you will. This advice stuck in her mind as she continued to train.

Creative forms was her forte and her newly discovered attitude to win paid off in her last year as junior in the world games. She persevered to win the 15-17 year old female creative forms world title, meanwhile also taking a third place in Japanese forms out of a large delegation. But creative forms were her first love and where she intended to make her mark as she advanced into the adult competition world.

However as she trained for the upcoming challenge in the adult ranks she also succumbed to injury that prevented her from practicing the fanatical moves required in creative forms. With a goal of being the most coveted female Mexican forms player, Daniela moved toward emphasizing Japanese forms over creative, the entity their school was built upon and where her instructor’s son was renown in the NBL for competition.

With a return to Super Grands 13 in Panama City, Florida, Daniela’s contemporary dream of winning in women’s Japanese forms came to fruition as she topped a powerhouse including Melissa Sioson, MaryLynn Maerten and Casey Marks to win the world title, an accomplishment she’s won twice since then out of the three times she’s returned to the Super Grands. As the reigning female Japanese forms champion she has little intention of letting go any time soon either. Her goal is to win as many Japanese forms title in a row as possible and to win the most titles ever won by a Mexican. Well that won’t take much as she’s presently already tied for the most with four.

Karate is her life, now marrying into it. Like many other competitors, NBL tournaments have provided the opportunity to find a husband (or wife) in this case Jacob Tapia who was an NBL promoter in El Paso, Texas, until she stole him away to Mexico City last year. They met at Super Grands in Buffalo, New York in 2005. The young couple have now started their own school in metropolitan Mexico City where they intend to produce their own champions in the NBL. Besides teaching martial arts and operating a school she is finishing up college, but as far as she’s concerned martial arts is her life and for now competition is a large part of it.