STATE COLLEGE, PA – As North Penn High School students plodded to third period last Friday, nine pupils instead embarked on an educational voyage to State College, Pennsylvania for the Academic Decathlon State Competition.
Three and a half hours of intense studying ensued as Sam Curlee, Serena Jiang, Jerry Zhao, Nate Lamb, Scott Landes, Matt Zarenkiewicz, Eddie Bogert, Kris Robinson, and Patrick Nicodemus quizzed each other on subjects ranging from music to economics. Of course, this wasn’t the first time the group had broached these topics- they have been studying hard since November in order to prepare, and their hard work earned them more than just a pat on the back.
The team brought home a cumulative 42 medals- sixteen gold, sixteen silver, and ten bronze. The competition was organized into three divisions: Honors, Scholastic, and Varsity. Honors Competitors have unweighted GPAs over 3.75, Scholastic competitors have GPAs between 3 and 3.74, and Varsity competitors have GPAs between 2 and 2.99. The results are as follows:
Honors Competitors:
Sam Curlee: Three gold medals in music, math, and economics. One silver medal in Social Science.
Serena Jiang: One silver medal in math.
Jerry Zhao: One gold medal in art and four bronze medals in social science, math, science, and economics.
Scholastic Competitors:
Nate Lamb: One gold medal in Economics. Three Silver medals in math, art, and speech. Two bronze medals in science and Language and Literature.
Scott Landes: Two gold medals in music and math. One silver in economics. One bronze in Social Science.
Matt Zarenkiewicz: Two silver medals in essay and interview.
Varsity Competitors:
Eddie Bogert: Four silver medals for math, Language and Literature, art, and economics. Two bronze medals in Social Science and Essay.
Kris Robinson: One gold medal in interview. Four silver medals in essay, music, art, and language and literature. One bronze in speech.
Patrick Nicodemus: Eight gold medals (out of ten categories).
Despite his impressive amount of gold medals, Nicodemus said that beating their biggest rival and the winners of that PA State competition last year, Moniteau Academy, was the best part of the whole experience.
“This is a huge jump from last year. Last year we could almost taste victory but missed it; this year we left the competition in the dust.”
By earning the highest overall scores in their particular categories, Nate Lamb, Patrick Nicodemus, Jerry Zhao, and Sam Curlee took four of the nine spots on the State All Star team and were awarded cash prizes.
Along with earning two silver medals, Matt Zarenkiewicz took on the role of team captain. Along with motivating the team with rewards such as Cinnabon at the Mall of America, he “quote[d] movie and tv monologues. [His] ending line for both days of the competition was ‘you are a lion, take what’s yours’ by Jack Donaghey.”
Although the Academic Decathlon team is overjoyed at their sweeping victory, they are already looking ahead to the National Competition in Minnesota, which is from April 25th to the 28th.
Nicodemus said that “Early in the year we joked about nationals but now that it’s happening we’re afraid and excited and thrilled and getting ready to buckle down and study. We’ll meet up in small groups at homes and coffee shops and drive through flashcards and packets and practice tests, and the crazy thing is that we’ll have fun doing it…I think North Penn can expect to shatter a few existing state records and become a real player on the national stage.”
Nicodemus and other varsity Competitors hope to break North Penn alumnus Mark Fuchs’s record, who scored 7,958.4 points at Nationals in 2004. Scholastic competitors will target another North Penn alumnus’s record, Phil Cerami’s record of 8,230.8 points, the second highest in state history. And the Honors Competitors face beating Josephine Dru’s 1998 record of a whapping 8,920 points, the highest in state history, if they want to beat school and state records.
The North Penn Academic Decathlon Team’s dedication and ambition showed in the State Competition when they brought home over forty medals, and hopefully will help bring them to victory at nationals next month.