On Saturday, February 7, 2015, Harriton’s Academic Decathlon team placed third at the competitive Eastern Pennsylvania Academic Decathlon Regionals.

Harriton lost the opportunity to compete at the state competition, by a hair, to a well-prepared Souderton team. The score was close enough that if the Harriton team had entered one more Varsity member, it would have been able to qualify for States.

This competition, however, proved to be a marked transition from Harriton’s recent competitive history, as it has been traditionally shadowed by regional greats North Penn High School and Souderton Area High School. North Penn has won the state competition the last two years and frequently performs well at the national competitions.

In Academic Decathlon, competitors challenge their counterparts from other schools who have similar Grade Point Averages (Honors: 3.75-4.00, Scholastic: 3.00-3.74, Varsity: 0.00-2.99). They compete by completing written tests in Mathematics, Economics, Art, Music, and Literature and conducting a Speech and Interview.

Each event is scored on a 1000 point scale and a team’s score is derived from the total scores of all its participants in all the events. North Penn’s total score at the competition was 41,436, Souderton’s was 33,809, and Harriton’s was 32,711, slightly over a thousand less. See below for Harriton’s individual medal count at the Eastern Pennsylvania Regionals.

Harriton was also able to snatch one of the top overall places, which award to those competing a sum of 100 dollars for first place, 50 dollars for second place, and 25 dollars for third place. The majority of the cash prizes awarded was to North Penn, who dominated the leaderboards.

The impressive performance at Regionals signifies a turnaround in the team’s performance. Nevertheless, the team has found great difficulty in recruiting additional Varsity members. Only two of the permitted three Varsity competitors competed at the Regionals, leading to Harriton’s loss to Souderton. Despite this year’s disheartening loss, the team has coped well and is extremely optimistic of its future.

One of the captains, Vera Lee, says, “Even though we won a whopping 23 medals total, we were at a disadvantage compared to other schools because we don’t have a full C [varsity] team.  Since our C team isn’t complete, our team score was missing an entire set of scores, and so we were just short of making it to states. I’d really encourage anybody to join Academic Decathlon. Our team has become so close, bonding from shared enjoyment of learning interesting things. Hopefully I’ll see some new faces on the team next year as well!”

Those with a GPA of less than 3.00 are strongly encouraged to contact Ms. Gehret or Mr. Warren, the team’s teacher advisors.

Gold
Gillian Bobnak (S) – Music
Jacob Rothschild (S) – Literature
Jacob Rothschild (S) – Mathematics
Kevin Wong (S) – Interview
Jacob Leis (V) – Speech

Silver
Hunter Sporn (H) – Essay
Gillian Bobnak (S) – Art
Kevin Wong (S) – Overall
Kevin Wong (S) – Economics
Kevin Wong (S) – Mathematics
Kevin Wong (S) – Science
Kevin Wong (S) – Social Science
Matthew Bedenko (V) – Social Science

Bronze
Brooke Krancer (H) – Literature
Hunter Sporn (H) – Literature
Hunter Sporn (H) – Speech
Jacob Rothschild (S) – Economics
Jacob Rothschild (S) – Music
Kevin Wong (S) – Literature
Matthew Bedenko (V) – Interview
Matthew Bedenko (V) – Music
Jacob Leis (V) – Art
Jacob Leis (V) – Essay
Jacob Leis (V) – Mathematics