Torrance West’s Brain Team Isn’t Unhappy to Finish 3rd in State

It would have been nice to be the No. 1 academic decathlon team in the state, but brain-weary members of the Torrance West High School team say there are advantages to their third-place finish in last weekend’s state contest.

“It’s over! Now we can get on with our lives,” trumpeted John Mangan, one of nine West High students who competed in the California Academic Decathlon on Friday and Saturday at UC Riverside.

West High lost to Laguna Hills High School, the first-place team, and Pacific Palisades High School, which captured second place.

The Laguna Hills High team now will compete in the U.S. Academic Decathlon in April.

Mangan and fellow decathloners David Ozenne, Doug Kunz, Jindos Yazdany, Beth Miles, Jenny Hardy, Gavin Wasserman, Michal Simek and Cameron Vilhauer won the Los Angeles County title in November and continued cramming for the state decathlon--considered the Super Bowl of academic quizzes--until the eve of the contest.

Coach George Floratos said his team ran into bad luck Saturday, when four team members got the flu.

Simek, one of the four, said he knows he didn’t do his best. “We got that thing that’s going around,” he said.

In another stroke of bad luck, the West High team was chosen to be the first to deliver its speeches, an important element of the grueling contest, which pits A, B and C-average students against their counterparts on other teams. Judges typically score conservatively at first, Floratos said. “It was the luck of the draw, and we lost.”

However, West High tied with Pacific Palisades in the Super Quiz portion of the two-day test. The quiz, patterned after the TV game show “Jeopardy,” is considered the decathlon’s toughest event.

Before the state match, Simek joked that he had studied all year to answer five quiz questions correctly. During the competition, he got three right, he said, “but I knew the answer to everyone else’s question.”

Floratos said he has no regrets and won’t revise his coaching techniques for next year’s team. Competition is important, but so is the process of learning, said Floratos, who before the contest had advised his team to stay loose and have fun.

Team members seemed to take that advice to heart. They showed up for a formal decathlon dinner dressed in togas, the garment of Roman scholars.

“If I could bottle their looseness, I would,” Floratos said Tuesday.

Simek, who competed against other C students, agreed that his team had the right attitude. He said West High probably could have been No. 1 if team members had been willing to sacrifice their social lives.

“But this wasn’t our whole life,” said Simek, who learned English seven years ago after immigrating from Czechoslovakia with his parents.

Besides, Simek said, he didn’t walk away empty-handed.

“I always suspected I was pretty good at the things that I do,” he said, “but I never had a basis for it. Now, this win tells me I can really do it. I did it once, and I can do it again if I try.”