Team Crams in Bid to Regain Academic Prize

Know this trivia about El Camino Real High School’s academic decathlon team and you begin to understand: The team jackets are stitched in Greek letters and the squad’s poet wears a T-shirt bearing the face of a French auteur.

The Los Angeles school’s team will represent California in the U.S. Academic Decathlon, which starts today in Anchorage. And, of course, the squad marked the countdown with Roman numerals.

Armed with enough calculus to school Sir Isaac Newton and a grasp of the symbolism in Paul Gauguin’s paintings, the nine seniors from the Woodland Hills campus are a different breed of high school student--and they know it. As one of their coaches says, they can be cocky and pretentious, silly and even violent.

They could also be national champs.

El Camino, which has captured five state titles in 10 years, won the national Academic Decathlon tournament in 1998. Since then, Moorpark and Simi Valley high schools in Ventura County have captured the California title and, in Moorpark’s case in 1999, the U.S. trophy.

This year, all other California competition has been pushed aside by El Camino’s team of rambunctious rookies, who were freshmen when their school brought home its last national trophy. Now, as they see it, one, maybe two, teams stand in their way.

In their own state finals, the Texas and Illinois teams amassed more points than El Camino. But now, going into the three-day national finals, the slate is wiped clean.

The multiple-choice tests are new, the judges have never heard the decathletes’ speeches and, since winning the state title, El Camino’s brains have spent more than 150 hours in their littered study hall and de facto clubhouse.

“We are cautiously optimistic,” Scott Lulovics said from Anchorage. “We’re trying to cram as much as we can--a last-minute dash to the finish line.”

For eight months, since the beginning of school, Lulovics, Elan Bar, Walter Ching, Grace Giles, Aria Haghighi, Samantha Henry, Dennis Kuo, Ryan Ruby and Alan Wittenberg have cast aside homework, slashed their Internet time and, in Henry’s case, packed away the flute, trombone and drums to prepare for competition from 500 of America’s brightest high school students.

“Those are my stress releasers,” Henry said of her instruments, “and when I don’t have my stress releasers, I’m a mess.”

Tests in six subjects, a speech, an interview, an essay and a quiz taken before cheering fans constitute the Academic Decathlon. The contest is not so much a test of knowledge as of memorization and endurance. The students who do best are not only smart, they know how to study.

Referring to an essay about bats by philosopher Thomas Nagel, Ruby, the team’s man of letters, said: “However much we learn about a bat’s brain, you can never learn what it’s like to be [a bat], so, similarly, no matter how much you think you know about Academic Decathlon, you can really never tell how it’s going to be until you actually do it.”

Not all decathletes are honor roll students. Each nine-member squad must field A, B and C students, known respectively as honors, scholastic and varsity decathletes.

“Academic Decathlon is the only place I will ever be on the varsity team,” said Wittenberg, 18, who is known by his teammates as the “evil genius” and as a decent bridge player.

This year, 55 schools from 39 states will compete in Anchorage, with the winner to be announced Saturday night. El Camino is California’s only representative in the competition.

The returning champions, James E. Taylor High School from the Houston suburb of Katy, scored the highest in state competitions--1,276 points more than El Camino, out of a possible total of 60,000. “They’re the God team,” Ruby said. “I’d like to know what Texas does.” Whitney M. Young Magnet High School from Chicago is considered the second-strongest team coming out of the state competitions.

Those schools and El Camino have a tradition of dominating the decathlon. In El Camino’s case, winning the state championship so often has led to rumors that the school somehow cheats and that its decathletes are snobby, charges that the team and its coaches laugh off.

“We’re definitely not about being elitist at all,” said coach Christian Cerone, an English teacher. “We encourage them to go out and be friendly and be sportsmanlike.”

The coach of El Camino’s big competition, Taylor High, said that in El Camino’s case, success has bred more success.

“They just have a tradition of winning, and once that tradition of winning is set, it just kind of grows,” Cynthia Swetnam said.

Indeed, the Academic Decathlon is taken seriously at El Camino. Melinda Owen, the team’s other coach, estimates that the school has spent $1,000 this year on study guides. El Camino Principal Ron Bauer boasts about the school’s six straight city championships as if “Deca,” as it’s known on campus, were a sport, and newspaper articles about the 1998 national title hang in Bauer’s office. He is part of the entourage of more than 30 teachers, administrators, parents and siblings in Anchorage.

This year’s El Camino team has competed well in the decathlon’s economics, language and literature and speech categories. But based on their performance last month among California schools, the decathletes need to improve in art and on their essays.

Another weak spot is the decathlon’s “super quiz,” which tests their recall of articles about psychology, philosophy and religion.

Regardless of whether the El Camino students leave Alaska as national champions, they will almost certainly not leave empty-handed. At the state tournament, the team won 28 individual medals, and Kuo, probably the team’s quietest and most modest member, scored highest in California. Teammate Haghighi, considered the squad clown, trailed Kuo by 12 points, out of a possible 10,000.