Laguna Hills Wins Battle of State Scholars : Competition: The high school beat out Palisades High to win its second straight championship in the California Academic Decathlon. The team will compete for the national title in April.

No one’s talking “three-peat” yet, not publicly at least. There’s the small matter of the national competition in Los Angeles next month to worry about before that time comes.

But in the meantime, Laguna Hills High school laid claim Sunday to its second straight state championship in the California Academic Decathlon, beating out Palisades High school from Los Angeles in the competition, considered the Super Bowl of academic contests.

“To me, this was tremendous, more satisfying than last year,” said Jay Kim, the team captain and winner of the top individual award in the highest division.

“All the odds were against us,” said Kim, 17, who hopes to go to Harvard. “This is not a team that was loaded with natural intelligence. We have some brains, but last year’s team, if you look at IQs and that stuff, was just unbelievably intelligent. This year, it was hard work.”

In addition to Kim, four Laguna Hills students placed in the top five among individuals in their divisions, answering questions and writing essays in 10 categories. Lyndon Johnson’s dog, the Elvis Presley hit “Hound Dog,” the radical 1960s publication Ramparts and the history of U.S. missions in space were all fodder for the competition.

The Laguna Hills team, a perennial winner in county, state and national competition, scored a total of 44,582 points out of a possible 60,000 to ace out Palisades by more than 1,400 points. West High School of Torrance finished third with 42,769 points.

The Palisades score of 43,161 may change upward pending a computer recount of one of its students’ scores--but that change would not be enough to alter the outcome of the competition, according to Jane Moore, event spokeswoman.

The winners were honored Sunday at a banquet at the Riverside Convention Center after the three-day event, which attracted 45 schools and 400 students in grades 11 and 12.

The decathlon was created 20 years ago by former Orange County Supt. of Schools Robert Peterson to test and encourage students in a variety of subjects, including economics, essay-writing, fine arts, literature, math, speech, science, social science and interview skills.

West High won the Super Quiz, which is considered one of the toughest events in the decathlon. This year’s topic for the show, which is patterned after the television game show “Jeopardy!” was space exploration. Palisades High took second place, and Laguna Hills third.

Laguna Hills, with one of the largest cheering sections, had more than 25 parents rooting them on at the Super Quiz, along with many students from last year’s winning team, back from colleges across the state to see if their successors could take the title.

The Super Quiz is the only part of the competition open to the public.

Winners in the division for schools with under 1,000 students included Del Oro High School of Placer County, 38,240 points; Oakridge High School of El Dorado County, 36,140 points; and Pleasant Valley High School of Butte County, 36,090 points.

The next stop now for Laguna Hills is the national competition to be held in April at Occidental College in Los Angeles. Laguna Hills took second in the nationals last year in Des Moines, Iowa, but the team is now promising to avenge that loss to the Texas state champion in its own back yard.

“Our goal is to win the brass ring,” said high school Principal Wayne Mickaelian, who attended the Riverside competition.

“I think we’re going to win it,” Kathy Lane, co-coach of the team, said of the nationals. “Last year we lost by three questions and the kids are determined not to let that happen again.”

But with the nationals in Los Angeles, co-coach Roger Gunderson noted: “As the home team, a number of eyes are going to be focused on us. That adds a little bit more pressure.”

Team officials and students said they saw the odds stacked against them this year for several reasons--they were competing with eight students instead of nine because one girl moved in mid-season, and they drew the unenviable first slot in the essay contest, a position that some see as working against them in the competition.

And when the announcements of winners began Sunday and the team did not place highly in the breakdown by subject categories--such as social sciences and math--some took it as a bad sign.

“We figured maybe it wasn’t our year,” Kim recalled.

But the outlook started to change when the individual student winners were announced--and Laguna, with five, dominated. Then came the top overall honors by school, and for the second straight year, the title was theirs.

“This is my greatest coaching success,” Gunderson said. “I’ve never had a more fulfilling victory than this one.”

On the Laguna Hills team are Kim, Ryan Sakamoto and Todd Faurot, all veterans of the 1990 state champion team, and newcomers George Danenhauer, Sian Baker, Robin Cheney, Kirk Brown and Teddy Chen. Taking individual honors in their respective divisions, broken down by grade-point average, were Brown, with a third place in the lower range; Danenhauer, a second in the mid-range; Faurot, fifth in the mid-range; Chen, fifth in the top range, and Kim with first in the top range.