News

Over the weekend, the American Canyon High Decathlon Team represented Napa County at the California State Championships for Academic Decathlon in Santa Clara. The team consisted of students from Honors, Scholastic, and Varsity levels, who were required to take seven tests, as well as participate in a prepared and impromptu speech, an interview, and an essay.

The American Canyon High Decathlon Team competed in Division 3. Each level of their team is composed of students whose GPA falls within a particular range and each team is composed of 2 to 3 decathletes in each level. Despite missing one of their Varsity members due to illness, the team performed admirably, improving their initial ranking of 16th out of 21 teams in the division to 14th out of 21 teams–out of 59 teams competing throughout California.

The team included Arianne Adrineda, Katherine Marsden, and Zachary Zeng in Honors; Joshua Barnes, Elena Countouriotis, and Mischa Sanchez in Scholastic; and Jayden Barrera and Ananya Sriram in Varsity (Sriram was unable to attend).

The theme of the championship was the American Revolution, and all tests were on that topic with the exception of math which covered Algebra and Trigonometry. The seven tests assessed the decathlete's knowledge of art, economics, literature, math, music, science, and social science.

The top two overall scoring decathletes were used to calculate the team score, with Katherine Marsden earning the Gold medal as the top-scoring decathlete on the team. Zachary Zeng also earned a Gold medal, missing a perfect score by only one question in Math. Joshua Barnes earned a Silver medal in Music, Elena Countouriotis earned a Bronze medal in Speech, and Mischa Sanchez earned a Silver medal in Interview.

The team would like to thank their coach, Alma Gonzalez, and their chaperones Scott Marsden, Anne Adrineda, Lisa Chu, and Francis Hoe for their wonderful support throughout the competition. They would also like to thank Kyla Cansino, Teo Gascon, Beth Goff, Elizabeth Hawkins, Mae Ling Hayes, Mark Joseph, Bareera Khurram, Kristin Nelson, David Oro, Dana Page, Alicia Robert, Allison Roeh, Lesli Servin Medina, Brian Smith, Colin Velicaria, Nancy Wynne Rivera, Y Vu, and Yao Yanez for serving as mock speech or interview judges and providing valuable feedback in preparation for the competition.

Overall, the American Canyon High Decathlon Team had a successful competition and represented their school and the county with pride and dedication.