School Celebrates Return of State Decathlon Champs

Beside a table full of trophies and medals, El Camino Real High School’s academic decathletes and coaches soaked in the congratulations at the Woodland Hills campus Monday after winning the state title over the weekend. Now, back to the books.

The nine seniors and two coaches will return Wednesday to their seven-hour daily study sessions after school.

“We had some low scores that shouldn’t have been low,” said decathlete Samantha Henry, citing her team’s math scores as needing improvement before next month’s national contest in Anchorage.

Before hunkering down, a brief celebration was in order. During their morning snack break, several hundred El Camino Real students cheered the decathletes, who brought back 18 medals from the state competition and two waist-high trophies. Sweating in their matching black jackets (inscribed with a quote from Mary Shelley’s “Frankenstein”--in Greek), decathletes Henry, Elan Bar, Walter Ching, Grace Giles, Aria Haghighi, Dennis Kuo, Scott Lulovics, Ryan Ruby and Alan Wittenberg talked to a few television cameras and tossed around the team’s new good-luck charm, a plush white seal named Jacket.

While Wittenberg’s teammates rehashed test questions from the weekend like athletes remembering a big game, he inhaled helium from one of the celebration’s balloons and squeaked out a few lines of Queen’s “We Are the Champions.”

This year’s academic decathlon, themed “Understanding the Self,” tests some of America’s brightest high school students on six subjects, with an esoteric mix including the philosophy of Ayn Rand, the music of Kenyan exorcisms and the mathematics of combinatorics (if you have to ask . . . ). Fifty-four teams from 38 states will compete April 18-21 in Anchorage.

El Camino Real’s state championship was the school’s fifth in 10 years. In 1998, the school won the national title, an achievement commemorated on a sign in front of the campus.

“When I got the job as coach, I decided I wanted to put another one up there for you,” Christian Cerone told the crowd.

Cerone and Melinda Owen, both English teachers, have coached the school’s team for two years. For other subjects, a platoon of El Camino Real teachers have pitched in.

Decathlete Aria Haghighi “told me that one of the questions he answered [over the weekend] was something we went over in class, so it made me feel good,” said Shanna Feldman, who teaches economics.

El Camino Real’s toughest competition in Anchorage could come from James E. Taylor High School of Katy, Texas, which won last year’s and 1997’s national titles. In its state round this year, Taylor amassed 1,276 more points than El Camino Real.

Since its 1998 U.S. title, El Camino Real has struggled to get past the Los Angeles Unified School District’s citywide competition. Two Ventura County high schools, Moorpark and Simi Valley, represented California in 1999 and 2000, respectively. Moorpark, which won the national trophy two years ago, placed second of 50 teams in the state contest.