Academic Decathlon competed at their first meet of the year on Saturday, and came back with more than satisfactory results. Placing second overall, the team beat every team they lost to at state last year with the exception of Lebanon Trail High School.
Although the Redhawks Decathlon team did fall short to Lebanon Trail, advisor Sarah Wiseman is confident they will get them next time. Wiseman plans to identify shortcomings and work to improve those weak spots.
“I think that some people were really well rounded and scored well on all their events, but now they need to focus on the strategy of scoring really high in a couple events,”Wiseman said. “Other people meddled in [one subject] but weren’t consistent across the board. So we need to target which people need to do more broad focus on all the topics versus where they’ll really excel.”
For Varsity Team Member senior Nathan Reynolds, this was his first ever AcDec competition which left him a little nervous.
“This was my first [competition] so I didn’t fully know what to expect,” Reynolds said. “So the entire time I was thinking, ‘what is this going to be like’, so I was just trying to figure out what was going on.”
For first-time competitor senior Riley Cleaves, the results were surprising and a prideful moment. However, they’re taking this success as a motivator to improve for the next competition.
“Individually I did better than I thought I would getting 2nd in Math, 4th in Econ & Science, 5th in Music, and 6th in Art as well as 6th place individual overall,” Cleaves said. “[I’m] proud of myself and everyone else on the team as many of us placed in specific topics or our divisions. Seeing how well I could do with minimal effort has really motivated me to put more work towards Acdec so I can do even better.”
The next step for Reynolds, is to learn from his mistakes and identify what went wrong from practice to competition.
“It was a little disappointing even though I placed,” Reynolds said. “I didn’t do as well as I thought I was going to do. We have the practice tests that we took before and I did a lot better on those. I’m definitely going to review the material a little bit more. But I will say our team, overall, did a lot better this year than we had in the past.”
The full results are as follows:
Division Placing:
-Jai Dilbaghi for placing 2nd in Scholastic
-Zaara Ahmed for placing 4th in Varsity
-Riley Cleaves for placing 6th in Varsity
Event Placing:
Honors
-Prakriti Ashwin: 2nd in Literature
-Jyoshika Kimani: 6th in Art, 5th in Social Science
-Isaac Leng: 2nd in Economics
-Alan Christopher Rajkumar: 6th in Social Science
Scholastic
-Arjun Dammalapati: 5th in Math
-Dhwani Mittal: 5th in Music, 5th in Science, and 3rd in Economica
-Jai Dilbaghi: 5th in Math, 5th in Science, 4th in Economics, 4th in Social Science, 1st in Art
-Zach Moland: 1st in Music
-Lakshita Singh: 4th in Music
Varsity
-Zaara Ahmed: 2nd in Music, 3rd in Science, 3rd in Literature, 3rd in Social Science, 4th in Art
-Riley Cleaves: 2nd in Math, 4th in Economics, 4th in Science, 5th in Music, 6th in Art
-Luke Kobayashi: 3rd in Math, 6th in Music, 6th in Social Science
-Nathan Reynolds: 5th in Economics, 6th in Science
