El Camino Scholars Win District Decathlon

Editor’s note: Due to a production error, parts of this story published Saturday were deleted. The story is being rerun today in its entirety.

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El Camino Real High School’s Academic Decathlon team took home the Woodland Hills school’s sixth consecutive Academic Decathlon title Friday evening from the downtown L.A. hotel where the awards were announced.

The nine-member team scored 47,705 points in the Los Angeles Unified School District’s two-day competition that concluded last weekend at UCLA with the Super Quiz.

Marshall High School of Los Feliz came in second, with 43,455, and Garfield High of Los Angeles was third with 41,702 points, decathlon officials announced at a Friday evening banquet at the Westin Bonaventure Hotel in downtown Los Angeles.

El Camino’s Scott Lulovics of West Hills, who was losing his voice from all the screaming and yelling, said, “It’s all been worth it, all the hard work, every minute.

“For me this means another month of studying until 10 o’clock at night,” Lulovics, 18, said. But “It’s all worth it.”

The top three winners will be accompanied to the California Academic Decathlon by Los Angeles High School with 41,276 points, North Hollywood with 41,257 points and Palisades Charter with 39,895 points.

Earlier Friday, Palos Verdes Peninsula High School learned that the school is the official first-place winner of the 2001 Los Angeles County Academic Decathlon, with a score of 43,650 points.

The Palos Verdes members discovered they had outscored 51 other teams during an awards ceremony at the Quiet Cannon Country Club in Montebello.

Team members sat through the entire day’s announcements hoping their name would be the last one called. When the tension finally broke, Palos Verdes Peninsula was announced the victor for the third consecutive year.

“We all just screamed and hugged each other. We were just so excited,” said team coach Roberta Kordich.

One team member, Esther Tsai, was the overall highest point-getter at this year’s competition in just her second year competing.

She said she and her teammates waited with bated breath as winners were announced. Near the end, she felt confident of her team’s chances at overall victory.

“Once we heard the No. 2 announced, we knew we had won,” said Esther, 17, of Rancho Palos Verdes.

Standing out at the county level is an achievement, but Esther has loftier goals in mind.

“Yeah, it’s great to win L.A. County, but we’re looking forward to state,” she said. “We hope we’ll do well there.”

West High School in Torrance scored 41,150 points and Burbank High School scored 40,616 points to garner second- and third-place county honors, respectively.

Fourth and fifth places were captured by Beverly Hills High School and Glen A. Wilson High School of Hacienda Heights.

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The official results for both the county and district contests are compilations of scores from nine areas of the competition and those from the Super Quiz, a game-show like contest in which students answer questions on a specific theme. This year’s was “Understanding the Self,” and included philosophy, religion and psychology.

Super Quiz winners were announced after last weekend’s competition. Official overall decathlon scores were tabulated and reported at Friday’s two banquets.

The state Academic Decathlon will be held March 16-18 in Los Angeles.

In the private school category, teams from Alemany High School in Mission Hills and St. Francis High School and Flintridge Sacred Heart Academy, both of La Canada Flintridge, will compete at the state level.

Alemany won its sixth consecutive decathlon victory last Saturday.

The top-scoring team of the state games will move on to compete in the national Academic Decathlon held April 18-21 in Anchorage.