Granada Hills Wins 3rd City Academic Decathlon Championship

Two-time defending national champion Granada Hills High was named Friday night as the winner of the Los Angeles Unified School District Academic Decathlon for the third consecutive year with 56,804.7 points out of a possible 65,400.

Nine other teams qualified as wild card entrants for the California Academic Decathlon, which will be held March 15-17 in Sacramento: Marshall (56,445.4); Franklin (55,913.6); El Camino Real (55,421.3); Bell (47,871.2); Garfield (43,768.9); Hamilton (43,096.7); Narbonne (42,799.6); Francis Polytechnic (42,355.7); and North Hollywood (42,073.5).

Marvin Paparisto of Marshall was the top individual scorer with 9,252.9 points. Hamidah Mahmud of Granada Hills was second with 9,074.3 and Johnathan Yih of El Camino Real was third with 9,020.

Nick Weber of Granada Hills won the Coach of the Year award.

The Academic Decathlon began Jan. 26 at the Roybal Learning Center near downtown Los Angeles, with more than 500 students from 58 high schools competing in the speech, interview and essay categories and taking tests in art, economics, language and literature, mathematics, music and school science.

The competition concluded with the Super Quiz, also at the Roybal Learning Center.

The study topic was Russia.

The results were announced at an awards ceremony at Hollywood High School.