Students on the Academic Decathlon team competed at the state finals in San Antonio on Friday and Saturday, finishing with results that left head coach Tim Johannes proud.

“We competed with all of the best schools in the state of Texas and we ended up tenth place out of all the teams in Texas,” Johannes said. “So we’re super excited about that. Very happy with the results.”

The team not only performed well at the meet, but they also showed growth from regionals, according to Johannes.

“We improved about 2000 points from the regional meet, which made us pretty happy,” he said. “A lot of the kids have their best performance of the year. We ended up walking away with five individual medals and we’re real excited about that.”

The team accumulated 39,768 out of 60,000 possible points, earning 10th in the medium school division and moving up to 26th overall.

“This weekend we had a lot of fun because it was just really nice to spend a lot of time with the teammates,” Academic Decathalon president Dhwani Mittal said. “We’ve grown really close together over the past couple months that we’ve been working together and it was really rewarding because the amount of time that we spent studying the resource guides and practicing our speeches.”

Several students on the team placed and earned medals:

• Overall
  • Varsity: Abhay Joshy – 7th
• Art
  • Honors: Samiya Sahu – 4th, Gregory Matthew – 9th, Isaac Leng – 10th
  • Scholastic: Dhwani Mittal – 4th, Zachary Moland – 10th
• Economics
  • Honors: Gregory Matthew – 9th
  • Varsity: Abhay Joshy – 5th
• Literature
  • Honors: Samiya Sahu – 8th
  • Scholastic: Zachary Moland – 8th, Dhwani Mittal – 10th
  • Varsity: Abhay Joshy – 7th , Jonathan Tolentino Ruiz – 8th

Academic Decathlons' path to State:

AcDec soars towards state finals after regional competition Saturday

Fifth place finish for AcDec in first competition of the year

• Math
  • Honors: Isaac Leng – 9th
  • Scholastic: Jai Dilbaghi – 9th
  • Varsity: Hrithik Shanmugavel – 8th, Jonathan Tolentino Ruiz – 10th
• Science
  • Honors: Samiya Sahu – 8th
  • Varsity: Abhay Joshy – 8th
• Social Science
  • Honors: Gregory Matthew – 4th, Isaac Leng – 9th, Samiya Sahu – 10th
  • Scholastic: Jai Dilbaghi – 4th, Zachary Moland – 9th
  • Varsity: Abhay Joshy and Hrithik Shanmugavel – 10th
• Essay
  • Honors: Gregory Mathew – 8th, Samiya Sahu – 9th
  • Scholastic: Zachary Moland – 7th , Jai Dilbaghi – 8th
  • Varsity: Abhay Joshy and Hrithik Shanmugavel – 5th
• Interview
  • Honors: Gregory Matthew – 6th
  • Varsity: Hrithik Shanmugavel – 8th