Test of Skills--and Luck

For good luck, Kamil Nagji flavors his jalapeno pizza with Tabasco sauce while he studies Picasso, Gershwin, Egyptian history and “Siddhartha.”

Jared Quinn sometimes needs a jolt from Coke, which he drinks from a cola can nestled inside a dirty black sneaker.

Lisa Concoff says she thinks better when she has her stuffed green frog--”a Beanie Baby wannabe”--that was called Frisbee until her friends started taking the frog’s name literally.

At the state Academic Decathlon this weekend, competition among schools is so fierce, the defending champions from El Camino Real High School say that beyond intelligence, hard work and good coaching, they’ll call upon lucky charms to help boost confidence, toys to calm nerves and quirkiness to ease tensions.

“Whatever works,” said co-coach Mark Johnson, who last year helped El Camino beat teams from 37 states, including archrival Taylor High School of Katy, Texas, which had won the national championship the year before. “Whatever helps them do good, works for me.”

Not that the team needs much luck. In August, the students began studying art, music, science, history and literature. For the past month or so, after school and on weekends, the team has practiced inside the school’s fourth-floor community room, painted in yellow and stocked with books, circular tables, a refrigerator and dusty old cots.

El Camino has a tradition of winning, including last year’s national competition, four state tournaments and six district championships since the competition began in 1979. The current team is made up of seniors, two of whom earned perfect SAT scores, and most of whom can pick and choose from the nation’s top colleges and universities.

Last June, about 45 students tried out for El Camino’s decathlon team. Under decathlon rules, the team consists of students with A, B and C grade-point averages.

Nancy Fu, who was the top-scoring student overall in the Los Angeles competition last month, is the only returning member of last year’s national championship team.

About 50 teams will compete Friday and Saturday. The winning school will represent California at the national decathlon next month in Fullerton.

“El Camino is obviously the team to beat,” said Judy Combs, executive director of the California Academic Decathlon. “But they’ll have competition. Moorpark [High School] is aching to defeat El Camino, and [the students] are just focused on that.”

Garfield High School in Los Angeles and Laguna Hills High School in Orange County are other top rivals.

In their socks and bare feet, with Doritos nachos nearby, El Camino team members have written practice essays on brain anatomy and literary allusions in T.S. Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.” They’ve taken practice tests on David Hockney’s “Mulholland Drive: The Road to the Studio.” They’ve discussed the difference between comic and dramatic opera; consciousness and unconsciousness.

The break comes each night, about 6 p.m., when parents and teachers bring dinner: chicken and rice, mashed potatoes and cheese pizza. Team members go home between 9 and 10 p.m., when some watch TV, others finish homework and others just go to bed.

Collectively, the number of hours they’ve spent watching TV has decreased by 75% since they began intense decathlon preparation. The number of hours they’ve slept each week in the past month has decreased by 33%.

“We’ve been studying like crazy,” Nagji said. “I’m so tired, I just zonk out at night.”

A few days ago, he woke up about 4 a.m. crying because he thought the team had lost. Then he looked at his pager, realized it was a bad dream and went back to sleep, thinking to himself, “To lose would suck.”

At the Los Angeles competition, some students approached Fu, saying, ‘Hey, you’re Nancy Fu. I’m going to beat you.”

“Most were friendly and joking,” said Fu. “The others can just go away.”

Although she has an impeccable academic record and a good-luck charm--her stuffed, brown-and-white monkey Edgar--Fu said her stress level is high. She doesn’t want to let the team down. Sometimes, when it all gets to be too much, she’ll literally roar. And feel much better.

Michael Pak relieves stress by reciting the word “Poughkeepsie.”

He also chews about 10 sticks of gum each day, preferably fresh-mint Trident, and reads car magazines that feature Ferraris. He’s taking six or seven magazines with him to the state competition in Stockton.

When Meeta Chakravarti feels the pressure, she watches Tom Cruise movies, her favorite being “Top Gun,” which she views “a good once a week.”

Sometimes for good luck, she bounces on her head a figurine of E.T. phoning home. She likes it because her sister bought it for her at Universal Studios on a day she couldn’t go along because she had to study.

“I like it because E.T.’s phoning home, he’s accomplishing his goals,” Chakravarti said. “It tells me that I can accomplish my goals.”

(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX / INFOGRAPHIC)

Meeta Chakravarti, Calabasas

* SAT score: 1480

* College picks: UCLA, UC Berkeley, Claremont McKenna

* Favorite subject: Advanced Placement Government

* Best brain food: Sausage and pineapple pizza

* Hobbies: Classical Indian dancing

* Favorite book: “The Silence of the Lambs”

* Best competition advice:

“My mom told me not to visualize the opponent but to visualize my own personal success.”

* Stress level on a scale of 1 to 10: 9

Nancy Fu, West Hills

* SAT score: 1600

* College picks: Stanford, UC Berkeley, Harvard, Yale, UCLA

* Favorite subject: “I’m a dork; I like them all.”

* Best brain food: Strawberry pie, instant chicken Ramen noodles, Reese’s peanut butter cups

* Hobbies: Bridge, watching “The X-Files,” “being stupid with my friends”

* Favorite color: Clear. “It’s true and lucid.”

* Best competition advice:

“Be facetious.”

* Stress level on a scale of 1 to 10: Infinity

Kamil Nagji, West Hills

* SAT score: 1500

* College picks: Stanford, Harvard, UCLA

* Favorite subject: Advanced Placement Calculus

* Best brain food: Tabasco sauce

* Favorite element: Gold. “I love to wear it.”

* Favorite obscure fact: “Mozart was an ugly child.”

* What makes him most nervous: “The female species.”

* Stress level on a scale of 1 to 10: 11

Rajesh Jaganath, West Hills

* SAT score: 1600

* College picks: Duke, Yale, UC Berkeley

* Favorite subject: Advanced Placement Calculus

* Best brain food: Sugar

* Best way to relieve stress: Sleep

* Favorite obscure fact: In ancient Egypt, the God of Wisdom had a baboon face.

* Favorite element: Oxygen. “I like to breathe.”

* Stress level on a scale of 1 to 10: 11-plus

Vadim Bendersky, West Hills

* SAT score: 1490

* College picks: UCLA, UC Berkeley, Columbia

* Favorite subject: Economics

* Best brain food: Coca-Cola

* Lucky charm: Blue decathlon jacket with his name misspelled Zadium

* Favorite obscure fact: Babylon had more than 1,000 temples

* Favorite element: Titanium. “It’s strong, yet extremely light.”

* Stress level on a scale of 1 to 10: 9.4

Jared Quinn, West Hills

* SAT score: 1260

* College picks: UC Berkeley, USC, Emerson College

* Favorite subject: Journalism

* Best brain food: “Whatever is available, and hopefully dead.”

* Lucky charm: A stuffed Heimlich from “A Bug’s Life”

* Favorite book: “Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas”

* What makes him most nervous: “That I’ll wake up and it will be all over and I won’t remember anything”

* Stress level on a scale of 1 to 10: 16

Lisa Concoff, West Hills

* SAT score: 1490

* College picks: UCLA, UC Berkeley, USC

* Favorite subject: English

* Best brain food: Cold mashed potatoes

* Hobbies: Playing piano, surfing the Internet, teaching Israeli dance

* What makes her most nervous: Earthquakes and giving impromptu speeches

* What makes her laugh: Hypocrisy

* Stress level on a scale of 1 to 10: 11

Tara Paravar, Woodland Hills

* SAT score: 1470

* College picks: Caltech, MIT, UCLA, Harvard, Duke, UC Berkeley

* Favorite subject: English

* Best brain food: Burritos with chicken, black beans and rice

* Favorite math equation: Quadratic equation

* What makes her nervous: “Not being happy in my life.”

* Favorite chemical element: Einsteinium. It reminds her of the sixth grade, in science class, when a boy told Paravar that if she discovered an element, she could call it Paravarium.

* Stress level on a scale of 1 to 10: 13.7

Michael Pak, Northridge

* SAT score: 1500

* College picks: Columbia, Cornell, UCLA

* Favorite subject: Economics

* Best brain food: Steak tacos

* Favorite hobby: Table tennis

* Dream car: A yellow Ferrari F360, “and I would not have personalized plates because that would draw attention away from the car itself.”

* Favorite element: Plutonium. “Because it’s the first one I noticed when I first looked at the [periodic] table.”

* Stress level on a scale of 1 to 10: 3