Youth Can Be an Asset for Academic Decathlon Coach

Altair Maine went to college when he was 11 and entered a Caltech doctoral program at 16. And yes, his parents are rocket scientists. Now 22, he is thought to be the youngest person to coach an academic decathlon team in the state.

Although he often dresses in a shirt and tie, the baby-faced coach of North Hollywood High School’s so-called “acadeca” team is often mistaken for a student. But after leading the team to a second-place finish in the Los Angeles Unified School District competition, and ruffling some feathers along the way, opponents were taking him seriously as the first day of the California Academic Decathlon began Friday in Modesto.

“They’re one of the teams to beat,” said Michael Jones, acadeca coach at Marshall High School in Los Angeles. “El Camino has got to really look out for North Hollywood.”

El Camino Real High School in Woodland Hills is the defending national champion and a team that Maine said he respects and wants to emulate.

Privately, competitors say Maine’s team is an arrogant one that they would like to see lose. In the district competition last month, the North Hollywood students dressed in military fatigues. The theatrics rubbed some people the wrong way.

Also causing some bad feelings was a controversial Web site maintained by a North Hollywood student that criticized the El Camino team.

Maine, who asked the student to shut it down, said, “I should have caught that Web page earlier.”

“These kids are really driven and really want to win,” he said. “Everybody wants to beat El Camino, but there’s no malice there.”

The Web site flap “has been overblown,” said Cliff Ker, decathlon coordinator for the Los Angeles Unified School District. “They’re great kids. They’re always trying to find a competitive edge.”

Southland Schools Well-Represented

They’ll need one in the field of 51 teams in Modesto. North Hollywood is one of nine teams from LAUSD. There also are four other teams from Los Angeles County--two public and two private--as well as competitors from Ventura, Orange, San Bernardino, Riverside and San Diego counties.

The decathlon ends with the Super Quiz on Saturday. The competitors are divided into three divisions, depending on the size of their school. Division winners, which will be announced Sunday, will represent California next month in the national competition in Phoenix.

Maine didn’t see all this coming when he joined the North Hollywood faculty at age 21, about the same time its acadeca coach quit. Shortly afterward, the district’s top-scorer, Phillip Tanedo, then an 11th-grader, recruited Maine to be the coach.

Clearly, Maine had much in common with the decathletes. He understood what it was like to be a gifted student in the less-than-prestigious surroundings of a large public school. Unlike most other teachers in the Highly Gifted Magnet program on campus, in which some of the decathletes are enrolled, Maine felt like a peer, treating students like young adults. They call him by his first name.

“He’s one of us,” Tanedo said, “someone we can relate to.”

On Maine’s birthday two weeks ago, the team took him to a video arcade to play a game in which players must quickly follow dance moves displayed on a screen. Maine proved that his gift for math and science did not translate to rhythm, his students said.

The team is tight-knit. They spent two weeks of their winter break at a rented house in Twenty-nine Palms preparing for the competition. One student stayed up 72 hours studying, a feat considered masochistic even by acadeca standards.

But, as with most teams, there’s a sense that hard work pays off. The team made its first appearance in state competition during Maine’s inaugural year and finished eighth overall. This year, North Hollywood’s district score was fourth-best.

Maine never went to high school himself. He skipped first and fourth grades and said goodbye to junior high in the seventh grade. Paradoxically, he said he never would have participated in the academic decathlon had he attended high school. He never liked cramming or studying through memorization.

“Learning is a matter of paying attention and thinking when first presented,” Maine said.

Inspired to Go Into Teaching

He credits his parents, both engineers for NASA at Edwards Air Force Base, for most of his early knowledge. He said he has no regrets about being ushered through a special college program for gifted children at Cal State Los Angeles, where he earned a degree in geology.

He spent 21/2 years in the doctoral program at Caltech, but said he didn’t have the temperament to continue. But it did inspire him to become a teacher.

Maine said he turned down lucrative offers to be a computer programmer and decided to teach because he wanted to bring higher standards to the public school system.

“He’s very committed and has an enormous sense of character,” said North Hollywood Principal John Hyland. “He’s not just intelligent, he has a sense of purpose. He had many choices, but he chose to be a public school teacher.”