Venice Science Bowl Team Seeks to Replicate Winning Formula

The scrimmaging is furiously paced and demanding, and it takes place in the back of the chemistry lab.

Members of the Venice High Science Bowl team fire answers to brain-teasing scientific questions between bites of sandwiches.

The school that won the National Science Bowl in 1996 and 1997, then failed to win even the Los Angeles Unified School District regional competition this year, is in training for the ’99 regionals in February.

“What makes up the majority of our atmosphere?” snaps out coach Richard Erdman, who has been at Venice High since he graduated from UCLA 29 years ago.

A student hits the buzzer.

“Nitrogen.”

Erdman’s students spend long hours reading old textbooks and magazines, gathering obscure facts that will enable them to withstand the grueling competition.

They are tested in practice on their knowledge of the sciences from the basic to the arcane: The solidified lava of a volcano belongs to what family of rock? (Igneous.) What condition is caused by a deficiency in the oxygen-carrying component of the blood? (Anemia.) What is the heaviest naturally occurring element? (Uranium.)

No school in the nation has had more recent success in the National Science Bowl competition than Venice. In addition to its regional and national titles in ’96 and ‘97, it won L.A. regional honors in 1993 and 1994. But this year it slipped to a disappointing eighth in the regionals.

Opponents next year will include such formidable contenders as Van Nuys High School, which captured the national title in 1995, and North Hollywood High, which won last year’s regionals and took second place in the national finals.

“We are not expected to win, but we just might sneak in there,” said Erdman.

Venice, which has a language magnet program, often finds itself competing against schools with magnet programs designed for science and generally gifted students.

“We are not deep as some of the other schools,” Erdman said. “Some of the kids on the Science Bowl team are also on the academic decathlon team. Our kids have to do multiple things. They have to work harder. . . . That’s why by the time we finish with them, they don’t know what to do with free time.”

Students at Erdman’s lunchtime session say the value of the practices will pay off in later life.

“You learn how to deal with pressure,” said Mario Lujan, a 17-year-old senior who was munching on a turkey sandwich during a recent practice. “It’s good preparation for college.”

Lujan, a captain of one of the schools’s two Science Bowl teams and a member of its academic decathlon squad, wants to be a premed major next year at UCLA, Stanford or Yale. He also wants to continue studies in the Japanese language he gained a fondness for when he was taking it in the ninth grade.

He is driven. When he was in elementary school, Lujan used to help out his father as he worked in the neighborhood as a gardener. “He never asked me to do anything heavy, just rake some leaves,” he recalled. “I didn’t like the work, I didn’t have the time.”

It conflicted with school work, with his fascination with the brain, with his dream to one day become a neurosurgeon. The Science Bowl team, he said, will give him a sharper edge.

The students on the Science Bowl team say they are not looking just for down-the-road rewards.

Carlos Jimenez, a 16-year-old junior, finds studying to music to be a form of relaxation. Robin Erdman, a senior, finds that it brings her closer to her father--the coach.

Jasper Lin, 16, says he feels challenged to regain respectability for a team whose history is attested to by the six banners--for winning four regionals and two national--hanging in the chemistry lab.

“We practice to get better and better,” he said. “It doesn’t make us look like nerds, and we are not passed off that way. The team is respected because we have succeeded.”

The Science Bowl is a round-robin tournament that pits one school against another until only two teams are left to vie for the championship. Players buzz in to answer “tossup” questions. If they are correct, they can try to solve bonus problems. Subjects range from computer science to physics, chemistry, astronomy and mathematics.

The national bowl is sponsored by the U.S. Department of Energy to promote science and technology studies at a time when many U.S. schools have been found lacking. The Los Angeles Department of Water and Power sponsors the regional championship, in which Los Angeles city schools compete along with some private and parochial schools. Regional winners receive $1,000 scholarships and all-expense-paid trips to the championships in Washington, D.C., in May.

During his practice sessions, Erdman tosses questions, reviews rules and practices strategies. The winning teams, he said, were “gamblers,” willing to guess the answers to sticky questions.

The school, whose attendance zone consists of neighborhoods ranging from upper-middle-class sections of Mar Vista to the impoverished Oakwood section of Venice, also invested in a buzzer system for students to practice on, similar to the one used on TV’s “Jeopardy.”

“We used to slap our hands on the table until they turned red, but that didn’t work,” Erdman said. “A couple of times in competition the students found themselves slapping the table instead of hitting the buzzer and we looked like idiots.”