Team’s C Students Are No Slackers
When ponytail-sporting, self-professed academic slouch Micah Roth was approached by his history teacher about joining the Academic Decathlon squad at El Camino Real High School -- the reigning national champions -- he was dumbfounded.
“Have you seen my grades?” Roth, 17, recalls saying, referring to his C grade-point average.
The teacher had indeed seen Roth’s marks, and they were precisely why coaches at the Woodland Hills school wanted him. Three of the nine members of their vaunted academic team -- and of every other high school Academic Decathlon team -- are required to have cumulative grade-point averages south of B (3.0).
Decathlon competitions may be the only place in academia where average students are so celebrated and coveted.
Each year, Academic Decathlon coaches across the country scour test results and grill teachers to hunt down those whip-smart kids who, for whatever reason, don’t perform well in the classroom. Typically, they don’t like school, balk at homework and, when it comes down to it, would rather play video games.
The three C students who accept the challenge at each school are known as varsity members.
They are kids like Kenton Whipple, a sophomore at perennial Maine state winner Scarborough High School, who jokingly diagnosed his academic challenge: “I’m really smart but I have no work ethic.”
Convincing these kids to add several hours a week of study isn’t an easy sell. At El Camino, which this year captured its seventh California state championship, making the team means staying after school until 10 p.m. each weeknight. It also consigns team members to “the Penthouse,” a room the school has devoted to the team, for eight hours each of the four Saturdays before the city event and many more weekends if they make it to state and national finals events.
Varsity members have been playing a crucial part in crowning a national champion, which will be announced tonight. California state champion El Camino Real is competing for its second straight U.S. title, which would be its fourth national title.
El Camino’s varsity members and their six teammates -- three A students, known as the honors members, and three B students, known as scholastics, have been hunkered down since Tuesday afternoon at the Palmer House Hilton in Chicago. They’ve been drilling one another in the histories of Sparta and Rome and cramming in last-minute calculus and trigonometry sessions with the math teacher they’ve brought along for tutoring.
In Thursday and Friday’s competitions, they wrote essays, solved brutally hard calculus problems, made prepared and impromptu speeches and did one-on-one interviews with judges, while also being grilled about the history, culture, art, literature and music of ancient civilizations, this year’s theme.
Friday afternoon, Roth and his fellow varsity members Benjamin Farahmand and Jihwan Kim put the El Camino team in the lead of the only public event, the “Jeopardy”-style oral Super Quiz.
The victory was a big morale booster but counts for just 4% of the total score that will determine the champion.
El Camino’s three B students -- Lindsey Cohen, Laura Descher and Lindsay Gibbs -- and three A students -- Sean Follmer, Brian Hwang and Kevin Rosenberg -- also turned in stellar performances to hold on to the one-point margin.
To be sure, the honors students, typically off the charts in math and analytical abilities, pull in the bulk of the points. “But as far as attitude and commitment and work ethic, they’re all equal,” said Christian Cerone, an El Camino English teacher and head coach of the team.
Frequently, the varsity members complement the brainiacs’ math and science wizardry in the less academic facets of the Decathlon -- such as public speaking and interviews.
The varsity kids also tend to be more easy-going and humorous, even flaky, their coaches say. It is a distinction the self-deprecating varsity members seem to wear with pride, mocking themselves for forgetting books, getting something wrong or not paying attention.
When El Camino’s team ran into another state’s squad in the cavernous lobby of the downtown Chicago hotel where the competition is being held, Kim asked who were varsity members, reaching up to high-five his counterparts.
Usually, said varsity teammate Farahmand, the varsities are easy to spot, looking just a bit less “elite” than the honors students.
The elite atmosphere of the honors teams matches the colleges that have accepted them -- places like Dartmouth, Brown and Cornell.
“They got all the good colleges,” Farahmand joked.
Farahmand is appealing rejections from UCLA, UC Berkeley and UC San Diego, though he was accepted to UC Davis and UC Irvine.
Academic Decathlon members have successfully appealed rejections in the past, based on their turnarounds and performances on the squad.
For years, Farahmand was a whiz at math, a subject he loves, but ignored everything else to play video games, he said. He speaks Farsi at home: His parents fled Iran and immigrated to the U.S. when he was 2.
He said he joined the Academic Decathlon team because “I had nothing better to do.”
But competing against “really brilliant students” improved his study habits. As a result, he pulled his grade-point average up to 4.3 -- above an A -- in the first semester. “I was amazed,” he said.
Kim’s parents emigrated from South Korea, and the family speaks Korean at home. Short, vivacious and seemingly always in motion, Kim is known on the team as “MSG-ONE,” referring to all the monosodium glutamate he ingests from his Cup-o’-Noodle addiction.
Kim said he scored 1,550 on his SAT out of a possible 1,600, and he is a talented violinist.
But he said he was “too ashamed to disclose” his GPA.
It is these types of students whom the Academic Decathlon’s founder, the late Robert Peterson, former Orange County schools superintendent, had in mind when he started the program.
“It’s a highly effective, well-disguised remedial program,” said Marvin Cobb, California’s decathlon director. “It’s one of the finest examples of peer pressure I’ve ever seen.”
Roth, the senior whose history teacher identified his potential, said the competition “changed my whole concept of my future.”
“It’s given me skills, made me friends and given me a family outside my own.”
