Basking in Congratulatory Glow
Beside a table full of trophies and medals, El Camino Real High School’s academic decathletes and coaches soaked in the congratulations of the campus Monday after winning the state title over the weekend. Now, back to the books.
The nine seniors and their two coaches will return Wednesday to their daily seven-hour study sessions after school.
“We had some low scores that shouldn’t have been low,” said decathlete Samantha Henry, singling out her team’s math scores in the state competition as needing improvement before the national contest April 18-21 in Anchorage involving 54 teams from 38 states.
Before hunkering down, a brief celebration was in order.
During their morning snack break Monday, several hundred El Camino students cheered the decathletes, who brought back 18 medals and two waist-high trophies from the state competition.
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 the teammates rehashed test questions from the weekend like athletes remembering a big game, Wittenberg inhaled helium from one of the celebration’s balloons and squeaked out a few lines of Queen’s “We Are the Champions.” If there were a team neurologist, he would have discouraged this.
This year’s Academic Decathlon, themed “Understanding the Self,” tests some of America’s brightest high school students on six subjects, with the esoteric mix including the philosophy of Ayn Rand, the music of Kenyan exorcisms and the mathematics of combinatorics. (If you have to ask. . . .)
El Camino’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 and the decathlon’s speech and interview portions, a platoon of El Camino teachers has pitched in.
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’s toughest competition in Anchorage could come from James E. Taylor High School of Katy, Texas, which won national titles last year and in 1997. In its state round this year, Taylor High amassed 1,276 more points than El Camino. Illinois and Wisconsin are also expected to field strong teams.
Since its 1998 U. S. title, El Camino 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 this weekend’s state contest. The school’s decathletes have grown close to El Camino’s and have offered their study guides to prepare for the national meet.
