Granada Hills Charter High School was named winner of the national Academic Decathlon on Saturday, emerging from a horse-race of a competition with a Texas school to keep the title in California for a ninth consecutive year.



The big win came at the end of an hours-long awards banquet in Charlotte, N.C., in which many of the students repeatedly walked through a maze of tables to the stage to accept medals for individual victories. Several students, such as Austin Kang and Elysia Eastty, received at least a half-dozen individual prizes.



Granada Hills' score of 52,113.5 made it, by far, the overall winner of the competition, besting Dobie High School, from the Houston area, by about 1,700 points. The win is the 18th for a California school, and the 12th for the Los Angeles Unified School District.



By winning the national decathlon, Granada Hills came out ahead of 35 other teams from across the country that gathered in Charlotte for days of testing on such subjects as math, social science, economics and music theory; they also participated in a rapid-response trivia relay called the Super Quiz. The teams consisted of nine A, B and C students.



Granada Hills' team includes Austin Kang, Celine Ta, Joon Lee, Harsimar Dhanoa, Shagun Goyal, Eugene Lee, Elysia Eastty, Riki Higashida and Sindhura Seeni. The coaches are Matt Arnold, Spencer Wolf and Nick Weber.

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The pressure's on for Texas, California teams at Academic Decathlon

-- Rick Rojas in Charlotte, N.C.