No Question About It--El Camino in Title Hunt After Super Quiz Win : Education: The Woodland Hills high school team is considered a top contender for the U.S. Academic Decathlon championship today.

Students from El Camino Real High School in Woodland Hills, vying for the national academic decathlon championship, beat out 47 teams Saturday to claim top honors in the Super Quiz, a pressure-packed College Bowl-style event.

“I am so relieved,” said Mark Johnson, one of El Camino’s coaches, looking happy but nearly faint after watching his charges rack up a total of 27 correct answers out of 30. “I thought I was going to die.”

The victory was encouraging for his team, because the Super Quiz winner has often gone on to capture the national title. However, neither Johnson nor fellow coach Jeff Craig dared predict the overall outcome--to be announced tonight--of the weekend-long United States Academic Decathlon. El Camino, representing California, is considered to be in hot contention with teams from Arizona, Illinois and Texas.

“It’s completely up in the air,” Craig said.

The Texas and Arizona teams tied for second in the Super Quiz with 26 correct answers. Illinois tied for fifth with 23. Teams from 47 states and the District of Columbia are competing for the championship.

The Super Quiz topped a day of objective tests in six subjects ranging from fine arts to mathematics.

The contest was also the only event of the two-day competition that was open to the public, with spectators coming from throughout the country to watch their children or their students answer questions.

It’s a setting that carries all the pressure of a game show and the rowdiness of a football game.

About 40 parents, teachers and administrators from El Camino--nearly one-fifth of the entire crowd--packed one section of bleachers in the huge pavilion at Boise State University.

They cheered, jumped to their feet, sported El Camino ribbons and waved lavender and white pennants already hoisted at city and state competitions.

“We’re rooting for you!” shouted some of the parents as the team filed past in a parade of all decathlon participants.

But Rebecca H. Gessert, 17, one of only two girls on El Camino’s nine-student team, found the presence of relatives slightly intimidating.

“It made me a little nervous to think that my parents came all the way out here to see this. And they still like me,” she quipped, referring to her disappointing score of 2 out of 5.

“When I went up there, I was dead numb,” said teammate Brian Lazarus, one of three El Camino contestants to pull in a perfect 5, which he celebrated after his performance with a twirl, a shout and a double-pump of his fists. “Now we’re feeling relieved that it’s all over.”

The Super Quiz topic this year was the environment, and contestants fielded questions on radon gas, solar energy and species extinction, among others.

Students were given seven seconds to answer each query.

The decathlon teams are composed of three students in each of the A, B and C categories, which represent the youths’ grade-point averages.

El Camino team members are Maggie Bandur, 18; Justin Behar, 17; Ethan Bernard, 18; Jeffrey Bernstein, 16; Joshua Erdman, 16; Gessert, 17; David Hickman, 18; Lazarus, 18, and Gil Strauss, 17.

Their final Super Quiz score on Saturday--the only score of the 10 events to be known unofficially in advance of tonight’s awards banquet--was the sum of the top two performers in each category.

The overall winner is also determined by the top two overall scores in each category.

Since those scores may not necessarily belong to the same students who performed so well in the Super Quiz, it is impossible to forecast a winner with certainty from Saturday’s result.