For the tenth time in 15 years, Granada Hills Charter School students strutted away as winners of the annual United States Academic Decathlon held in Garden Grove on April 25.
The team scored 52,148.9 points out of the near impossible 54,000 to secure the national title, winning against 139 high schools. No school in the 53-year history of the decathlon has achieved a perfect score at the national level.
GHC’s nine-member team consisted of “A” honors, “B” scholastic and “C or below” varsity students led by second-year returning seniors Tale Chen and Cristopher Gonzalez.
First-year student members were Saadan Atif, Serena Chon, Benjamin Cruz, Emmanuel Dominguez, Santiago Garcia-Uriarte, Francesca Molina and Mia Salinas.
All of them studied for the competition beginning last June and in part created a tight team resembling a nuclear family, often making sacrifices or giving up personal pleasures but gaining experience in other important ways.
Tale, a 17-year-old student is heading to University of California, Berkeley to study nuclear engineering and bone up on time management, a necessary tool for success.
“All of the hours that we were spending studying … had to be effective because if we weren’t spending our time doing something productive and effective then those hours would go to waste,” she said. “I also learned the value of time outside of the decathlon because … time outside of decathlon became very valuable.”
Tale said family and friends-time wasn’t wasted either.
“The decathlon taught me time management” she added. “Because we were in such a time crunch all the time being able to balance a lot of things … was a very, very valuable lesson.”
The future nuclear engineer had a daily habit that helped her stay on target — making her bed topped off with stuffed animals from her childhood.
“That always got me to start the day off right and it got me in a productive mindset,” she said. “That’s something that might not seem intuitive at first, but it actually really helped me be in that mindset every day especially leading up to the competition and I think it helped me start my days off right.”
This year’s competition was entitled, “The Roaring Twenties.” It involved 10 events centered on science, literature, art, music, social science, economics and mathematics.
Students were tested on specific topics in multiple-choice exams, essays and speeches on art, music and literature during the Jazz Age; introduction to electricity and magnetism; and the U.S. Economy in 1920. Even the most prepared test-taker had to duck curve balls.
“Math questions stood out a lot in my mind because math was one of the more difficult subjects in the competition,” said team leader Cristopher Gonzalez, an 18-year-old senior headed to Cal State Northridge to study math. “Also, very interestingly worded economics and science questions that stood out a lot to me. While I can’t remember the exact wording of the questions, they were worded in a way that was very different from what we had seen prior to that competition.”
Cristopher, a Granada Hills resident, took time during study blocks to wind down in quietness.
“I would just take some time to myself and just sit by myself in my room in silence, (to) be able to be with my own thoughts so I wouldn’t let that stress get to me the entire time,” he added.
The student-led team most likely would not have been as successful as they were without the guidance and tutelage of the head coach Tyler Lee and assistant coaches Bennett Cohen and Raji Toleco who lead the young scholars onto victory this time around.
Lee has been teaching for 11 years, seven of them coaching decathlons and three at Granada. He described this year’s team as especially admirable — each student experienced rough times during this year’s preparation.
“This team was a special group of kids … in how they came together and really got along as a family,” Lee said. “Each one of the decathletes had something tough happen and obstacles during the year, and the rest of the team kind of rallied around them each time. They were always there for each other and constantly impressed me.”
Lee believed that “family” connection helped carry the team to a successful end.
The annual competition was scored with an emphasis on academic tests and performances, rewarding in-depth knowledge, analytical skills and the ability to think critically under pressure. A total of 71 high-school decathlon teams competed on April 25.