El Camino Real Whoops It Up for National Champs

El Camino Real High School threw a raucous pep rally Wednesday for its national champion Academic Decathlon team, toasting the eight brainy seniors for bringing home the school’s third national title in seven years.

“You really make this district proud,” Los Angeles Unified School District Supt. Roy Romer told the team, which shared an outdoor stage with cheerleaders, the school band and the mountain of medals and trophies it had earned. “I really like the fact that we’re here celebrating an academic team, and not just an athletic team.”

The Woodland Hills school achieved the highest score -- 50,656 points out of a possible 60,000 -- of the 41 teams that competed in the national finals of the decathlon, a two-day series of tests and speeches held last weekend in Boise, Idaho.

To get to Boise, the team won local and state contests that are among the most competitive in the nation. Marvin Cobb, executive director of the state Academic Decathlon, noted that in the last 11 years, California’s champions have won the national title seven times -- and five of those were by L.A. Unified schools.

Only a handful of schools, however, can match El Camino’s passion for “AcaDeca.” A case crammed with past trophies and pictures of winning teams is on prominent display in the hallway. In the library, students study under huge banners boasting of the school’s city, state and national titles. And in front of the campus along Valley Circle Boulevard, permanent signs remind passersby of the school’s previous national championships in 1998 and 2001.

This week, the electronic sign out front also flashed the names of this year’s winning teammates -- Gary Fox, Patrick Liu, Adam Singer, Cassidy Ellis, Eric Rasyidi, Jonathan Lin, Chris Taylor and Adrian Wittenberg.

In the morning, students jammed into the quad for the rally, where local dignitaries praised the team members, the school and the district that produced them.

El Camino’s decathlon coach, Melinda Owen, introduced Heather Bandy, a member of the decathlon team at Reseda High School. The blind 16-year-old girl had a standout year for Reseda this year, and in Boise, national decathlon organizers gave her the annual Kristin Caperton Memorial Award for displaying “courage, determination and dedication.”

For friends of the El Camino team, the rally was a chance to cheer classmates they hadn’t seen much of this school year. Since last summer, the team put in more than 1,200 hours of organized study time to prepare for the decathlon -- including cram sessions in recent months that ran from 2:30 to 10 p.m. five nights a week and from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. on Saturday.

Senior Jackie Wilding, 17, held up a sign praising Wittenberg that read, in part, “Adrian = my hero.”

“I’ve seen the work they put in and it’s incredible,” Wilding said. “I wish I had the will power to do something like that.”

Even the teachers who serve as decathlon coaches got some respect. More than once, sophomore Andy Frasco was moved to give a rap-style shoutout to Owen, a popular English teacher.

“Yee-uh!” yelled Frasco, 16. “Ms. Owen’s a play-uh!”

For most of the campus, the rally was a culmination of three giddy days that saw this bookish crew receive the full-on conquering-hero treatment. Rasyidi said he’s been receiving hugs and high-fives “from people I don’t even know. Everybody’s just excited to bring it home for our school.”

Senior Shelly Yehuda, who has friends on the team, was smart enough to know that the cheers would probably extend far beyond campus.

“It’s an accomplishment,” she said. “And it makes all of the house prices in the area go up by a lot.”