Laguna Hills Leads Contest in Academics : Scholars: Members of the team, California’s only contender, are hoping they will surpass last year’s second-place finish in U.S. decathlon. Winner of event hosted by Occidental College will be announced Monday.

Laguna Hills High School remained a top contender to win the U.S. Academic Decathlon on Saturday after facing 44 other schools from around the country in a fast-paced quiz-show style event that wrapped up the two-day competition.

Laguna Hills High School, California’s state champion and the second-place finisher in last year’s national competition, finished in a four-way tie for second place in Saturday’s Super Quiz. But the eight team members were confident that they scored well in nine other events, including seven written tests they also took Saturday at Occidental College.

Laguna Hills is the only contender from California and faced tough competition from a Mesa, Ariz., school that placed first in the Super Quiz, and from schools in Texas, Georgia and Illinois that tied with Laguna Hills for second place.

The winning team will be announced Monday and its members are scheduled to meet President Bush later this week at the White House.

About 100 family, friends and other Laguna Hills High School fans cheered from the bleachers of the college’s gymnasium as each of their team members answered five questions during the Super Quiz--all on the topic of space exploration.

Laguna Hills team captain Jay Kim, a senior, answered four of the five questions correctly, but couldn’t get over the one he missed. Kim was asked what a high-energy astronomy observatory studies, and should have answered Cygnus X-1, a possible black hole. Instead, he said solar flares.

“I don’t know how I could have missed that,” Kim said.

Laguna Hills coaches Roger Gunderson and Kathy Lane said that their team is confident they have performed well over the two days, but that they will be “walking a tightrope” until the winner is announced.

“Right now we’re in the position we wanted to be in,” said team member Kirk Brown, 18. “We think we did really well.”

Last year, Laguna Hills took second place in the nationals in Des Moines, finishing just behind the state champions from Texas. The heartbreaking loss spurred a strong determination and a fierce desire for revenge this year. Team members have spent hours preparing for the decathlon.

“I think they have an excellent shot at taking first place and I hope they do it to get revenge for us,” said Jeff McCombs, 19, captain of last year’s Laguna Hills team and a student at UCLA.

Each school’s team had nine members from 11th and 12th grades. During the two days of competition with champions from 44 state competitions and the District of Columbia, the students were tested on math, science, social science, economics, language and literature, fine arts and essay writing. On Friday there was a speech and interviewing competition.

Each team is also broken into three divisions by grade point average--honors, scholastic and varsity--with the top two scores in each event counting toward the final score.

Laguna Hills has beaten more than 80 teams this year at county and state levels to get to Saturday’s national competition.

One indication that Laguna Hills was doing well came in Friday’s speech competition.

Out of more than 400 competitors, the top 13 were chosen to repeat their speeches Friday night and three were from Laguna Hills.

They were team captain Kim, 17, the top student in the honors level; George Danenhauer, 18, who was in first place in the scholastic division; and Kirk Brown, 18, who picked up second place among the varsity contenders.

Kim’s win was particularly impressive because he arrived from a scholarship interview in Atlanta just 10 minutes before he was scheduled to give his speech.