Moorpark B-Team on Sidelines of Academic Decathlon

While their A-team peers cram for the statewide Academic Decathlon next month, Moorpark High’s B-team is forced to cheer from the sidelines, shoved aside by an unwritten policy that is stirring protest among Ventura County educators.

Despite posting the second-best score in the recent Ventura County Academic Decathlon--behind only their own A, or varsity, team--the eight students on Moorpark High’s B-team are benched.

That means some 40 schools up and down the state with lower qualifying scores than Moorpark B-team’s 44,482 out of a possible 60,000 points will compete for a chance at the national decathlon while the second Musketeer squad watches.

“I’m very disappointed,” said senior Shanna Gibbs, captain of Moorpark’s junior varsity B-team. “We started out this year with the idea that both our teams could go, and that would be neat because it had never happened before. Then, [we] come to find out a few months later we couldn’t go. We were just in shock, like, ‘How can you do this to us?’ ”

At issue is the interpretation of a 2-year-old policy governing at-large entries. It dictates that the seven wild-card teams compete in the California Academic Decathlon by invitation only.

State decathlon Executive Director Judy C. Combs and her 17-member board of directors say the wild-card rule was meant to open the contest up to more schools in smaller counties. That means no high school can send more than one team to the state contest--no matter how high the score.

The rule governing wild-card entries never mentioned B-teams one way or the other until Moorpark called and asked, she added.

“I’m very sad about this,” Combs said in an interview Tuesday. “But there was never any intention of two teams from the same school attending [the state contest]. In all logical sense, we want more schools to have the opportunity to go to state if they’re invited to go. But at the state level, we don’t want multiple teams from the same school.”

The timing of Combs’ decision has sparked a firestorm of protest from Ventura County educators, because she verbally notified Moorpark Coach Larry Jones in November that only one of his teams could possibly advance to state. The decision came six months after Jones formed his two teams and two months after they began studying in earnest for the 10-event battle of the brains.

“It’s unfortunate that nobody bothered to ask about this [earlier],” Combs said. “I do feel bad for the kids; I’m in this for them. But I do know that they learned an awful lot that will stick with them for years, whether they go to state or not--for that I am grateful. I’m just sorry this miscommunication happened in November, instead of when they formed their team [in May].”

Ventura County Academic Decathlon coordinator Phil Gore and coach Ken Hibbitts of rival Simi Valley High are among those asking Combs to reconsider the decision, or at least delay implementation of the rule until next year, when all teams have fair warning. Combs said she does not anticipate a rule change.

“I believe if you create a competition for students based on the pursuit of academic excellence, then, when it comes to wild cards, the best teams should go,” Gore said. “I respectfully disagree with this decision because it discourages academic excellence.”

Prior to a January letter from Combs, none of the Ventura County decathlon participants interviewed said they had seen the one-team rule in writing anywhere. It is not mentioned in a guidebook for new decathlon coaches produced in Orange County, where the state contest is based, or in a national procedure manual.

“We would have been absolutely fine with the rule if we had known about it at the outset,” said Michelle Bergmanone of Moorpark High’s two coaches. “But we only found out in the middle of the year after our B-team was doing really well. It seems like they changed the rules midstream.”

The ones who lose in this situation are the eight scholars of the B-team, who spent countless hours preparing for the decathlon--a contest where students test their mental mettle in art, language and literature, math, music, social sciences and economics, plus essay writing, public speaking and interviewing.

“There will be 50 teams at the state finals, and my B-team score will be higher than 39 or 40 of them,” lamented Moorpark Coach Jones. “Los Angeles High was invited as a wild card. St. Francis High, Marshall High, Palisades were invited as wild cards. Beverly Hills High, too. Our B-team scored higher than all those schools, but they get to go on and my kids don’t.”

Simi Valley Coach Hibbitts, whose A-team placed third in the Ventura County competition behind the two Moorpark squads, said it’s time for California to run its statewide decathlon contests the way other competitive states do: take the top overall scorers, rather than one school per county plus seven wild cards.

“If they did what Texas and Illinois do and take the top 40 or 50 schools regardless of geographic location and what school a particular team belongs to, it would solve the problem,” said Hibbitts, whose A-team would have advanced to the state contest under that formula.

“It would be fair, and you’d really have the top schools of the state,” he continued. “Right now, there will be schools going to the state competition with much lower scores than any of the schools in Ventura County, because we’re one of the more competitive counties in the state. In a way, it’s almost like rewarding mediocrity to go strictly by geography rather than scores.”

Combs, however, said she does not want schools from smaller counties to be disenfranchised from the competition. If scores alone were the only measure, highly populated counties such as Los Angeles, Orange and Ventura might dominate the contest at the expense of Yolo or Butte counties, for example.

“We have a history of having one school represent each county for the last 18, 19 years,” she said. “It’s the mission of Academic Decathlon to bring about diversity of schools and to involve as many schools as possible. The chances are slim that we will ever judge on score alone. We would lose some of the smallest counties in the state that way. I can’t see the board of directors doing that.”