Valley Science Bowl Team Places 4th

North Hollywood High School placed fourth Monday in the Department of Energy’s National Science Bowl competition finals, losing a close match against the defending national champions.

DuPont Manual High School in Louisville, Ky., won the national competition that began Sunday in Chevy Chase, Md., with 300 students on 60 teams from 40 states.

Montgomery Blair High School from Silver Spring, Md., the 1999 champions, placed second this year and A & M Consolidated High School in College Station, Texas, third.

The San Fernando Valley team, which represented Los Angeles County, went into Monday’s final round as a favorite because it had finished second in the last two annual national competitions.

The team was also highly favored to win because it was undefeated in Sunday’s double-elimination competition, earning a place in the “winners bracket.” Teams in that bracket are most likely to walk away with the national championship, officials said.

But in its first matchup on Monday, the five-member team from North Hollywood lost to Montgomery Blair High School by a score of 114 to 90.

“It was a very close match,” said Walter Zeisl, a spokesman for the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power who accompanied the team to Maryland. The utility sponsored the regional science competition.

“Losing by 24 points is pretty close,” Zeisl said. “It’s the equivalent of missing two questions.”

North Hollywood also lost points when Montgomery Blair protested an answer and won the challenge, Zeisl said.

The loss dropped North Hollywood down into the “consolation bracket.”

In that competition, North Hollywood team members beat Sycamore High School of Cincinnati but lost to A & M Consolidated, giving North Hollywood a fourth-place finish overall.

Still, team member Jackie Wong said he was proud of North Hollywood’s accomplishments.

“Fourth place in the nation is a great thing,” said Wong, a senior who will enter Stanford University in the fall. “It’s been a wonderful experience. The friendships that have come out of this are incredible.”

Other members of the North Hollywood Science Bowl team are Daniel Bersohn, Tyler Rubin, Jeff Zira and captain Nina Han.

“The competition was extremely fierce this year and to get fourth in the nation was a real feat,” said Koh Ikeda, an Advanced Placement science teacher who coached the team through hundreds of hours of study. “They worked really hard, they stayed focused and they made me really proud.”

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North Hollywood Principal John Hyland said he was amazed by the students’ academic prowess as he watched the contest from the audience.

“The competition is intense and it’s astounding what these students go through in two days,” Hyland said. “These competitions really catalyze the brain. You can see the students wrestling with the subject matter. It’s amazing.”

Team members were rewarded with an expense-paid trip to Pittsburgh, where they will tour Department of Energy science facilities. They also took home a trophy and graphing calculators.