North Hollywood High Shares Lead in Science Bowl

The North Hollywood High School Science Bowl team’s dream of a first-ever national title--and the fourth consecutive championship for a Los Angeles school--drew closer Sunday in Washington, D.C., with two quick wins in the finals portion of the competition.

The champions will be crowned today at the completion of the double-elimination tournament.

“We’re ecstatic,” said Greg Marsden, North Hollywood’s team captain, after a day of answering questions on such subjects as chemistry and biology in the game-show-style competition. “It has been exhausting.”

One of North Hollywood’s two wins in the finals came against Arcadia High School, the only other team from Southern California. Earlier in the day, both schools made the elite field of 12 finalists after losing just one of seven preliminary rounds.

“It’s extremely tough competition,” said Iris Ahronowitz, another North Hollywood team member. “All we can ask of ourselves is that we do our best.”

Forty-eight teams from 32 states, the District of Columbia and the Virgin Islands competed in the first seven rounds.

North Hollywood beat schools from Nebraska, Ohio, Idaho, Virginia, Pennsylvania and the Virgin Islands, said Walter Zeisl, a spokesman for the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power, which is sponsoring the North Hollywood team. The team’s loss in the preliminary rounds came to a school from Massachusetts.

Arcadia, meanwhile, beat schools from Montana, Oklahoma, Oregon, Kansas and the District of Columbia in the preliminary rounds. Arcadia’s loss was to a Minnesota school that finished third overall last year.

In the finals, in addition to Arcadia, North Hollywood also beat a Pittsburgh school.

Arcadia’s finals win came over a Washington state school.

“They are a very good team,” Zeisl said of the Arcadia team.

In all, four schools--including North Hollywood--come into today’s action undefeated in finals competition from Sunday night. Each of the eight other schools suffered one loss.

The North Hollywood team--composed of Marsden, Ahronowitz, Emily Kuwahara, Emily Wang and Michael Saji--earned the right to represent the Los Angeles Unified School District earlier this year by winning a regional competition sponsored by the DWP.

Arcadia’s squad--Alex Fabrikant, Alexander Hong, Brian Li, Silvia Ngo and Vincent Auyeung--earned its spot by beating area schools from outside the LAUSD and from Riverside and Orange counties in another regional competition sponsored by NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

The national title has been claimed by Los Angeles schools the past three years: Van Nuys High in 1995 and Venice High in 1996 and 1997.

At Sunday’s national event, hosted by the U.S. Department of Energy, the schools were organized into six groups of eight teams. The students answered questions worth four and 10 points in subjects that included trigonometry and astronomy.

By dinner, after the initial seven rounds, the field had been reduced to the 12 finalist teams.

The victories from the first day of competition did not make the North Hollywood teens overconfident.

“We worry about every school,” said Marsden. “We just take one question at a time.”