Our Academic Decathlon team had only really one goal: to get a bigger trophy than last year.
We set our eyes on 2nd place with the hope of closing the gap between us and first place. I am incredibly proud to say that we now have a nice, shiny 2nd place trophy to sit next to our team’s almost-as-pretty 3rd place trophy. We walked away from the Jan. 27 competition not only moving up to 2nd place (from 3rd last year) in our division but overall in Ventura County. We also closed the gap to 1st place compared to last year — 2,000 rather than 7,000 point difference.
As a team, we did pretty well in the rankings in the subjects:
- 3rd Place: Essay, Math, Social Science, Economics
- 2nd Place: Art, Literature
- 1st Place: Science, Music
- We also tied in 1st with Westlake in SuperQuiz
In total, we walked away with 27 medals. Here is the following list of the medal winners:
Varsity:
- Nicole Olipani: 3rd in art and interview
- Allyssa Gabihan: 3rd in music. 2nd in literature. 1st in science, art, essay
Scholastic:
- Maverick Diaz: 2nd in essay
- Ava Noyola: 3rd in social science, essay. 2nd in music, art.
- Giovanni Sanchez: 3rd in music. 1st in science. Voted MVP
Honors:
- Melody Dimas: 3rd in literature.
- Aliya Guzman: 3rd in literature. 1st in interview.
- Alecksa Llarenas: 1st in interview
- Angel Chappidi: 1st in interview
- Dylan Cahuantzi: 2nd in science
- Cristian Rodriguez: 1st in essay, interview
- Gabriel Decastro: 2nd in science. 1st in social science, literature, music, art. Voted MVP. Highest Individual Score on our Team.
It has been a very long three months for this team (not including the work they started back in Q4 last year). These students have been putting in 12-hour shifts almost every day for the last three months, sacrificing weekends and even their winter break. There were a lot of tears (supposedly on my end) and not enough coffee (reason for the tears), but I think we all agreed that no matter the results, we were proud as a team of all that we accomplished. The commitment to competition was higher than our team had seen in a while.
BTW, if there was a “Most Spirited Team” award, our kids would have definitely won. As usual, they not only were incredibly loud about their personal achievements but about every other school as well. I had coaches, and even other school decathletes, tell me how much they appreciate the energy and sportsmanship our school brings to these events. Our kids really showed what it means to be a CI Raider.
