Final Exams

Moments before the first exam of the Academic Decathlon on Thursday morning, Simi Valley students were too anxious to sit still. Steve Mihalovits cracked his knuckles. Justin Underhill bit his fingernails. Cary Opel tapped his toes.

Jennifer Tran, meanwhile, was composed enough to give her Simi Valley High School teammates a few last-minute tips for their upcoming essay: Make sure you proofread for run-on sentences and don’t forget to check your handwriting.

It was Day 1 of the national finals of the Academic Decathlon, a “contest of academic strength” that rivals the intensity of the most competitive sporting event.

The two-day contest is a culmination of months of late-night study sessions. It is the brutal final step of a ladder toward the title of national champs. And it’s the students’ chance to show the judges the hundreds of facts they’ve learned about everything from Roman aqueducts to rural economic growth.

“This is it,” team captain Mike Truex said. “We’ve worked hard, and we’re going to have to work hard tonight. But we’ve been preparing for a long time and we’re ready.”

The contest started Thursday, when about 400 students from 38 states filed into a gymnasium at San Antonio College in Texas to write essays and take two tests: one on math and one on literature. They sat at long tables, with only calculators, pencils and test booklets in front of them. A nervous buzz filled the room.

Two hours later, the students rushed out of the room sighing and wiping their brows.

While most of the nine Ventura County students felt confident about their writing, a few didn’t seem as sure about the math exam.

“I blew the math,” Underhill said as he flipped through a study guide. “Now I have to make it up on the tests tomorrow.”

“They gave us the easiest questions, but they took the longest to do,” team member David Bartlett said.

And convinced that questions 3 and 11 did not have a right answer, the team filed a challenge with the national organizers.

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On Thursday afternoon, Simi’s students rehearsed their prepared speeches one final time before entering assigned classrooms. Dressed in sharp blue or black suits, they practiced to classmates, coaches, trees or walls. Some had already delivered their speeches between 80 and 100 times.

Bartlett delivered an animated talk about a mountain biking accident that taught him to live life to its fullest potential. Randy Xu told the success story of a Chinese immigrant: his father. In his speech, Mihalovits compared adolescence to the Gilligan’s Island ship that fights its way through the waves.

The students on Simi Valley’s team are as distinctive as their speeches. As required by the decathlon, the team has three students with an A average, three B students and three C students.

The honors decathletes are Opel, 18, an intensely serious teen who wants to be a biomedical engineer; Tran, 17, a sweet student who plays the piano and is close to her family and her boyfriend; and Xu, 17, who has already been accepted to Harvard.

The scholastic, or B students, are Kevin White, 17, an outgoing teen who likes computers; Truex, 18, who is the steady team captain; and Jeff Robertson, 18, a quiet student who wants to be a computer scientist.

The varsity, or C, students are Mihalovits, 17, a friendly teen who the coaches call the “rudder of the boat”; Bartlett, 18, who ran track and is involved with his church youth group; and Underhill, 17, a focused teen who the coaches call a “decathlon success story.”

“It takes the most well-rounded student to be the best decathlete,” Mihalovits said. “A . . . student who lacks social skills isn’t going to do very well.”

Simi Valley’s coaches, Ken and Sally Hibbitts, started their recruitment for the perfect team in May. They searched out students who would set aside jobs, clubs and sports teams, and dedicate their lives and their time to “acadeca,” students who would work as hard as they possibly could to bring home medals and trophies and defend Ventura County’s title as national winners.

The coaches held tryouts in December, and the top-scoring students made the cut. And, so far, so good.

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The students placed first in both the county and state contests, and now they are representing California here in San Antonio.

Sally Hibbitts said the team is like a fruitcake. Each student is unique--a strawberry, a candied cherry, a banana.

“But you put them all together, and it’s one great thing,” she said.

Today, the students will take another round of tests--in economics, social science, science, art and music. Then they will answer questions about the environment in the final and most popular event, the Super Quiz.

The winner will be announced at an awards ceremony Sunday.