Moorpark High Begins National Title Bid

After the first round of tests in the national finals of the Academic Decathlon on Thursday morning, the eight students on Moorpark High School’s team came out of the exam room sighing, shaking their heads and biting their fingernails.

“I think I bombed the math,” Nick Lange said.

“I wrote a good essay,” Rebecca Wershba said.

“I don’t know what to think,” Alexandra Dove said.

In the two-day “contest of academic strength,” Moorpark’s decathletes are vying for the title of national champions. That means they have to beat teams from 38 high schools from around the country, including No. 1-ranked James E. Taylor High from Katy, Texas.

If they do, they will be the second California team to win in as many years. Last year, El Camino High School in Woodland Hills came in first in the national competition.

Moorpark’s squad, Lange, Wershba, Dove, Ari Shaw, Arturo Barragan, John Ellis, Valerie Lake and Mitul Patel, have been studying to do just that for almost a year.

They have taken more than 500 practice tests, given their speeches at least 100 times, done 30 interview rehearsals and read both of the required novels, “Siddhartha” and “Remains of the Day,” four times. During spring break, they studied for 95 hours.

“Its been a long haul,” said Larry Jones, who has coached the team for seven years and said this is his last. “But we know [the win] is right there. We can smell it.”

The Moorpark students drove down to Orange County on Tuesday and have been cramming for the tests since. Wednesday night, they took a short break to attend an ice cream social with students from the other teams. Alexandra said she liked hearing everyone’s accents but it felt weird to just hang out.

“We’ve been in a room studying for such a long time that we’ve lost our social skills, she said.

After writing their essays and taking their written math and Super Quiz tests Thursday morning, the students rushed to one of their parents’ hotel rooms to change clothes. They took off the matching teal shirts that boasted their names and the team motto, “Arete,” a Greek word that means strive for excellence, show courage and win fame and glory. And they put on their freshly pressed power suits, shiny shoes and yellow-carnation boutonnieres.

Sitting by the swimming pool, the students compared test answers and snacked on peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwiches, apple slices and string cheese. And a few of the students rehearsed their speeches while Jones held a stopwatch to make sure they didn’t exceed the four-minute limit.

After Barragan closed his speech on Cesar Chavez, Jones smiled and gave him the thumbs up. “Your pacing was perfect, he said. “You still had 10 seconds to spare. Nice job.”

When the students got to Troy High School to do their speeches, their tension and anxiety were palpable. They paced the corridors, mouthed their speeches and hugged each other nervously.

And one by one, the students entered individual classrooms to give their prepared and impromptu speeches. In the latter, they received a few different choices and had to select one and prepare the speech in one minute. One student chose to give a Nobel Prize acceptance speech, while another brainstormed the different uses for a tennis ball.

Overall, after a shaky start Thursday morning, the Moorpark students said they felt confident about their performance.

“I kind of got in this zone and stopped thinking about the anticipation and started thinking about the task at hand,” Ari said.

The competition concludes today, when the students will take tests in economics, art, literature, music and social science. This afternoon, they will answer questions on the brain in the Super Quiz, the only event open to the public.

Frann Shermet, executive coordinator of the national contest, said the students have worked hard to prepare for this weekend’s contest.

“These students are intense,” she said. “They are just like any good basketball or football team. They’re very competitive.”

The winners will be announced at an awards banquet in Anaheim on Sunday, and the pressure’s on for Moorpark. For the last six years, a California team has placed in the top three. And for the last 15 years, a Texas team has done the same.

Barragan said its more than just wanting to beat Texas.

“It could be Texas, Rhode Island, whoever,” he said. “We just want to be national champs.”