St. Michael’s School had its best Academic Junior High Decathlon season to date, earning national team honors in two categories and seventh-grader Nathan Lee winning the individual mathematics national competition.
The team recently came in second place nationally in logic and fourth place overall. Lee’s individual subject national win was a first for the Poway school.
“This is our best showing, absolutely,” said head coach Lisa Matens.
The team were eighth-graders Eric Akkarakaran, Oleisa Chua, Gavin Gerken, Sara Sandfer, Matthew Toy and Jonathan Younes; and seventh graders Ethan Dang, Nathan Lee, Daniel Mara and Tony Palayur.
While St. Michael’s has fielded a decathlon team since 1997, when the contest began in the Diocese of San Diego, this is the first year it advanced to the national tournament as the regional winner, according to Matens.
She said Lee’s accomplishment was especially notable because as a seventh-grader he had to compete in eighth-grade level math. In addition, he earned a nearly perfect score.
Lee, 13, said he had a good feeling going into the mathematics contest due to his preparation.
“I was kind of expecting (to win), but seeing it on the screen is different than having a feeling,” Lee said. “It was really gratifying because I have been studying very hard. Overall the experience was really good.”
Lee said that in addition to his advanced math classes at St. Michael’s — they included algebra as a sixth-grader and geometry this year — he has also been working with a math tutor since fifth grade in order to learn advanced skills.
“I am ionate for math,” Lee said. “It doesn’t feel like work for me.”
This is Lee’s second year on the team, which he said he ed in order to expand his academic interests. As a sixth-grader he only competed in the team components, not an individual subject.
“It is very exciting for our school’s team to garner the first-place (regional) award for the sixth time,” Matens said of St. Michael’s performance at the diocese level, which qualified the team for the March 14 national contest. “St. Michael’s School has placed first more than any other teams in the diocese.”
The San Diego and Imperial Valley Catholic Schools regional contest had 33 teams competing this year, according to Matens. St. Michael’s came in first overall, second in super quiz and sixth in logic. Four students also won individual subject medals.
When the team had won the regional title before, the highest it could advance was a state championship, according to Matens. However, the state contest was eliminated when the national contest began a few years ago.
She said St. Michael’s had only two weeks to prepare between the in-person regional and virtual national contests and credited the team’s success to “internal motivation.” Matens called the students’ work with her and assistant coach Amber Samuels “a labor of love, long days and late nights.”
According to Matens, there are multiple components where teams earn points. There are two team events — one known as the super quiz, where they are asked to answer 10 questions in each of five subjects — fine arts, literature, religion, science and social science. There is also a logic quiz where teams have 60 minutes to complete 20 logic puzzles.
In addition, there are eight subject areas where individual students compete in a written exam. They are current events, English, fine arts, literature, mathematics, religion, science and social science. Matens said the English and math exams are based on the Common Core state standards for eighth-graders. The others are based on materials provided for the students to study early in the season.
“They work really hard,” Matens said, adding that this year’s theme was “making a difference,” so the study materials reflected the theme.
St. Michael’s team is open to sixth-, seventh- and eighth-graders, who compete early in the school year to earn one of its 10 spots, Matens said. This year only seventh- and eighth-graders were selected and St. Michael’s fielded only one team. She said there have been years when it sent two teams to competition.
“We had a lot of very determined students this year who worked (very hard),” Matens said, adding they also had to learn how to go from competing against each other in order to make the team, to working together so they could succeed as a team.
New to this year’s regional competition was the option to complete a theme-related community service project. Matens said only St. Michael’s and one other team in the region chose to do this.
“We thought the material they were learning lent itself to a service project,” Matens said. “Catholic social teaching is about caring for the poor and the dignity of the human person,” Matens said. “One of the books they studied was about Saint Mother Teresa, about her helping others who are very poor; and the Gospel about Jesus Christ. So we thought it was a no-brainer to do a service project so they could live what they were learning.”
For the project the students created a physical bouquet of decorated flower pots with soil and seeds, and a spiritual bouquet of prayers, masses and cards for the elderly women living in the Missionaries of Charity women’s homeless shelter in Tijuana. In order to deliver their gifts in person, the students were assisted by the Contemplative Missionaries of Charity in South San Diego. Following their regional win, the team returned to visit again with the sisters and thank them for their prayers, Matens said.
