Academic Decathlon won this year’s county competition and will attend the State Championship tournament in Sacramento from March 17-20.

Of the county victory, sophomore Athya Uthayakumar said, “We had a lot of fun. We’ve been preparing for a long time for [the county competition] and we scored high enough to make it to state, which we’ve done for the past few years. We brought about 18 to 20 members of the team to our county competition and we competed in the 10 events.”

According to sophomore Ashley Zhang, “Academic Decathlon is a competition where each high school sends people to participate in 10 different events. The three subjective events are speech, interview and essay; the seven objective ones are art, music, literature, science, economics, social science, and math.”

Zhang added, “We take a test on the 7 objective subjects, and for speech we prepare a three and a half to four minute prepared speech and a one minute impromptu speech. For interview, we conduct an interview with about 3 judges. [For essay,] we get 3 prompts based on the 7 different subjects.”

Zhang said that she’s nervous and excited about the state competition.

Senior captain Uma Gaffney added, “We’re in 2nd place in our division right now and there’s a pretty good margin between us and the next team, but I’m hoping for a Cinderella story. Except, you know, hard work instead of magic.” 

“I know a lot of people might think that taking a bunch of test doesn’t sound like the most fun thing in the world,” said junior Zoe Portnoff. “But it’s really great knowing that all of this knowledge is the culmination of all your efforts throughout the year, and it’s always really fun learning all the information in a style that really suits you. Everyone there wants to be there, so it makes the competition really fun.”