For Moorpark Champs, It’s Back to the Books

For months on end, the eight teenagers skimped on sleep. They put their social lives on hold. And let their other course work slide--all to study for the California Academic Decathlon.

On Monday, the new state champions from Moorpark High School didn’t head to Disneyland. They played hooky.

After some scholarly consideration, the Moorpark Academic Decathlon squad and coach Larry Jones decided that it was best to rest their brains for a day before starting all over.

Today begins the upstart squad’s five-week march toward the national decathlon at Cal State Fullerton, where a team from Texas is gunning for them.

“Today, we rest,” exhausted decathlete Mitul Patel, a 17-year-old senior, said Monday. “When we go back to school--the Texas team is 2,000 points ahead of us--so we have a lot of work to do.”

You heard right: They have to study even harder.

Savoring victory is all well and good, but the team members from Moorpark would rather continue cramming than crow about their championship.

Indeed, the Texas state champ scored about 2,000 points more than the Moorpark squad in the qualifying state tournament.

But the Moorpark team--Patel, junior Ari Shaw, and seniors Arturo Barragan, Alexandra Dove, John Ellis, Valerie Lake, Nick Lange and Rebecca Wershba--is comfortable playing the underdog.

The reigning national champion from El Camino Real High in Woodland Hills was widely expected to defend its state title at the competition held over the weekend in Stockton.

But when the final numbers were tallied Sunday, Moorpark had earned 49,391 of a possible 60,000 points, compared with El Camino’s 48,527.

In doing so, Moorpark became the first Ventura County school ever to win the state Academic Decathlon.

During the tournament, the squad members from this farming outpost turned growing suburb competed against schools nearly three times as large as Moorpark High. They battled against school districts with thousands more children than their city has residents.

And they emerged victorious.

“There’s no real secret to our strength,” said 18-year-old Wershba. “I think we’re just willing to work really, really hard. We’ve come this far not because we’re the smartest kids, but because we’re the ones willing to work and stay after school and study and read. It’s hard work.”

The decathlon tests students’ academic mettle in 10 subjects, including art, literature, math, music, social sciences and economics, plus essay writing, public speaking and interviewing.

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Earlier in the year, Moorpark learned that their B-team--the equivalent of a junior varsity squad--could not compete in the state decathlon, despite posting a higher score at the county level than 40 of the teams that went on to the California contest.

Rather than allow a controversial interpretation of a decathlon rule to discourage them, the Moorpark team members used the setback as inspiration.

“It was motivational,” Ellis said. “When we saw the B-team cheering for us, it made us want to do that much better to represent Moorpark and the B-team.”

As motivation this time around, the squad will try to win one for Jones, who has announced that he will retire at the end of this year, having coached for seven years.

“There’s so much more that we can do,” said Shaw, 16.

“We still have room to grow.”

For the five members of the Moorpark Academic Decathlon team who returned from last year’s squad, the desire to win is personal, Ellis said.

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“Last year, after we took second in the state, Mr. Jones said he wasn’t planning to come back,” Ellis recalled. “Then he said, ‘Do you want to win nationals?’ We said we did. He came back for us--because we said we wanted to win nationals.”

Now, Ellis said, the team members want to fulfill their part of the bargain.