El Camino Real Comes in 2nd in Super Quiz

For the casual sports fan, the Super Quiz portion of the U.S. Academic Decathlon was not exactly action-packed. Students from 40 states and British Columbia sat on a stage, listened to arcane multiple-choice questions, and filled out their answers on a standard-issue bubble sheet.

The audience of diehards, however, treated the event like a veritable Super Bowl of standardized testing.

On Friday, family and friends of this year’s decathletes, including supporters of California’s champions, El Camino Real High School -- descended by the hundreds on Boise’s downtown convention center for the Super Quiz relay, the only public competition in this sprawling, two-day mental endurance test.

Once assembled, they hollered, waved flags, and clanged cowbells. Some parents were even seen doing the wave.

Waving a school flag, James Hunt, 53, a parent from Arizona, said attending Super Quiz beat watching his son Marshall, 18, play basketball.

“It’s thrilling,” he said, “because you know he’s going to carry this stuff into the rest of his life.”

Giving academics the sis-boom-bah treatment is one of the main lures of the Academic Decathlon, a 23-year-old event involving more than 2,000 high schools in the United States and Canada.

Gus Picardo, a member of the decathlon board of directors, calls it “the premier academic competition in the United States, with the flavor of sports behind it.”

This year’s Super Quiz theme was the Lewis and Clark expedition. The questions were read by Rose Ann Abrahamson, a Lemhi Shoshone and the great-great-great niece of Sacagawea, who helped guide Lewis and Clark.

In the end -- after 44 questions about canoes, campsites and Indian chiefs -- Arizona’s Mountain View High School, one of the top contenders for the overall decathlon prize, was declared the winner of the Super Quiz relay after missing only one question.

El Camino, the No. 1 seed and two-time national champion, took second place in the relay.

The California team remained optimistic because the relay counts for only a small fraction of the overall decathlon, which includes two days of interviews, speeches and tests.

The Woodland Hills school fielded only eight participants this year, and as a result, lost points in the relay, which is designed for nine-member teams.

But, because of the complicated scoring system, El Camino’s player shortage -- brought on in December when a player left the team -- doesn’t matter as much in the overall decathlon.

El Camino contestants still felt that they had a pretty good shot at the national championship, which will be announced tonight.

El Camino co-coach Melinda Owen said Mountain View’s Super Quiz showing suggests that the Arizona team is giving California a run for its money this year. “Now, whether or not it actually means that, well ... we’ll see,” she said, noting that a number of other strong teams, including Texas and Wisconsin, also have a good shot.

The minutiae of decathlon scoring didn’t seem to preoccupy Tex Ellis at all as he watched his daughter, Cassidy, an El Camino senior, delve into her five allotted trivia questions Friday.

Wearing cowboy boots and a bolo tie, Ellis squinted at his daughter through a pair of binoculars. She was mulling the purpose of the Treaty of Prairie du Chien of 1825.

The Super Quiz is not the most audience-friendly quiz show. Because the students’ results aren’t posted until the end of each five-question round, most contestants give the crowd a signal when they know they’ve gotten one right.

The El Camino kids prefer to twirl their pencils.

After a few seconds on the Prairie du Chien question, Cassidy twirled. (It had something to do with tribal boundaries.)

Her father gave an approving hoot.

For the Ellises, this decathlon holds special meaning. Cassidy has dedicated her effort to her older brother, who was picked as an El Camino decathlon member five years ago, but died in a car accident before practices began.

“It’s kind of a deeply emotional thing for our family,” Cassidy said. “He was good at everything.”

Preparation for the decathlon is a serious undertaking, involving months of cramming on topics from economics to botany to music theory. As a result, the programs tend to attract students who want to learn more than their school can manage to teach them.

Max Conway, 16, made the Waukesha West High School team this year as a junior, but only as an alternate.

On Friday, he was sitting with the supporters of the Wisconsin state champions in a full-body Wolverine costume -- the Wolverine being Waukesha’s mascot.

“Nobody was going to get sick for this,” Conway said through his fierce Wolverine snout. “So I’m just here to support the team.”