Looking Smart, Team Gets Knowing Glances : Education: At the U.S. Academic Decathlon in Idaho, other contestants size up El Camino High of Woodland Hills as one of the squads to beat.

Their eyes are on the prize--a victory Sunday in the national academic decathlon. But to their amusement, and sometimes their amazement, the students from El Camino Real High School in Woodland Hills have noticed plenty of eyes on them.

“Everyone knows you’re one of the top teams and looks at you,” said El Camino senior Brian Lazarus, 18. “As soon as they hear that we’re from California, they get all serious.”

The San Fernando Valley team, representing the entire state, is considered one of those to beat in the United States Academic Decathlon, an annual battle of brain cells. On a beautifully sunny day in the capital of America’s potato state, more than 400 students from around the country kicked off the final conflict Friday after a year’s exhaustive preparation.

This year, the favorites are the teams from Illinois, Texas, California and Arizona, which boasted the top four scores going into the contest. El Camino scored 48,610 points out of a possible 60,000 in the statewide contest last month, but all teams enter the national competition starting from scratch.

A mere 800 points separated the top four rival states, a difference that can be wiped out with just four correct answers in the raucous College Bowl-like Super Quiz to be held today. It was impossible to rank the four teams going into the Idaho contest.

“We could put the names in a hat and pull them out one by one,” said Mark Johnson, one of El Camino’s two coaches. “It’s that close.”

On Friday, his nine charges repeated motions that they already had gone through twice at the city and state competitions. They wrote a timed essay, gussied themselves up to make an impression during a personal interview and modulated their voices to deliver prepared speeches to judges on topics ranging from extrasensory perception to cultural boundaries to punk rock.

But this time the feel was different, the edge keener--and the questions harder.

“They were just throwing questions at me” during the interview, recalled Justin Behar, 17, as he lounged in his hotel room, recuperating from the academic inquisition. Five questions into the interview and there was, “What’s the meaning of life?”

The question stymied him. After all, the incredulous youth said, he is just “Justin Behar, not Aristotle!” His coach and teammates smiled.

Jeffrey Bernstein, 16, one of two juniors on the team, found his hometown under assault during his bout with the interviewers.

“They started off with L.A.-bashing questions,” he said, recounting probing queries about the Rodney G. King beating, pollution and problems in the Los Angeles Unified School District. “Usually I try to put in humor in my answers, but how can you with such serious topics?”

The El Camino team finished early in the afternoon Friday and took the rest of the day to nap and do some last-minute cramming for today’s objective tests, which will cover six subjects. The day will be topped by the Super Quiz, which is the only event open to the public.

But the academic saturation and pressure of the competition were already in evidence as soon as the Southern California teen-agers, some wearing California Academic Decathlon T-shirts, stepped off the plane Tuesday night.

A student from the Idaho team, greeting fellow contestants as a decathlon host, remarked how intimidating it was to see a gold pendant in the shape of the mathematical symbol pi dangling from a chain around Bernstein’s neck.

Not quite. The charm was actually a Hebrew character meaning “life,” Bernstein explained with a chuckle.

Studying for Bernstein and his teammates began in earnest as soon as they set foot in their hotel. Despite the hotel’s idyllic location on the banks of the Boise River, the El Camino competitors--seven boys and two girls--have mostly remained sequestered in their rooms, squeezing out some final facts from well-worn textbooks.

During their late-night sessions, in rooms adorned with U2 posters and photographs of scantily clad women, the team members stopped studying only long enough to engage in a pillow fight across their adjoining balconies or to tackle each other in the hallway.

“Little things like that make us a family,” co-coach Jeff Craig said.

Amateur ornithologist Joshua Erdman, whose binoculars sit ready by his bed, bird-watched occasionally, while David Hickman sneaked a peek at daytime television. Have they watched much?

“A little bit, but we won’t admit to it,” Hickman, 18, said. “I saw ‘Oprah.’ ”