The eight students on Lakeview-Fort Oglethorpe High School's academic decathlon team will not be lining up on the football field or basketball court to celebrate their wins. They won't be the darlings of the school. There will be no pep rallies.
Yet, the school's academic decathlon team is a two-time defending state champion with nine total state titles and is the most decorated team on the campus on Highway 2.
The team recently returned from Bloomington, Minnesota, after finishing 24th in the nation at the United States Athletic Decathlon Association competition. Competing against elite high schools from around the country, LFO came in eighth out of 12 in its division.
"When you do a thing together, you are constantly together all the time working toward the same goal," said senior Jewel Okoronkwo, sounding much like an NFL quarterback. "It brings you closer to people. And I didn't have that because I don't do a sport. I am not on a team, and this gave me a chance to experience being on a team."
The effervescent Okoronkwo is the heart of the decathlon team. She left Bloomington with a gold medal as the team's leading scorer, a gold medal for being the team MVP as voted on by her peers, and a silver medal for finishing second overall in speech.
"It's about being a leader, and she led the team to success by teaching us how to study and do the work," said senior Ben Sprayberry, who is heading to Mercer to study industrial engineering.
Sprayberry won his division's gold medal in economics.
All team members compete in 10 events. In this case, it is not the pole vault or 100-meter dash; it is seven objective tests on seven different subjects: art, economics, language and literature, math, music, science and social science. The final three events involve a speech on a predetermined subject, an interview and an essay.
"It's like taking the ACT seven times," Sprayberry said of the test portion.
It is a safe calculation to say the students put in at least 600 hours of study between August 2018 and the April 2019 competition, he said.
Each team is divided into three divisions based on grade point average: Honors (3.75-4.0 GPA), Scholastic (3.0-3.74 GPA) and Varsity (0.0-2.99 GPA). The top two scores from each division count toward the final team score.
LFO, which has fielded an academic decathlon team for 15 years, has a student population of around 900, with nearly 60% on free and reduced-price lunch, according to school officials. Ian Beck, one of the team's coaches, said it's normal for half of her team to come from low-income families and rarely does she have parents who can contribute significantly to the $10,000 it takes annually to field the team. The team raises the money through small fundraisers and Beck said the LFO faculty contributes each year.
Beck, who is in her 14th year with the decathlon team, said she has had team members who were homeless, and one member had a parent die prior to the state championship in February.
"Sometimes, it's kind of like my high school football team playing the Atlanta Falcons," Beck said of watching her players from a small North Georgia town compete against elite high schools from across the country. "There are states where all the students do is prep for the decathlon with budgets around $20,000. I have students who have to work even as sophomores to pay family bills.
"The schools that excel are very elite with high expectations. Coming from a public school with high poverty, the expectations at nationals are more modest, but we were there. The spirit and dedication they had made them able to compete and have success."
The academic decathlon season each year involves a specific area of focus. This year, the theme was "The 1960s: A Transformational Decade." It's the reason junior Eden Muina joined the team.
"I joined the team because I was interested in the '60s and knew the subject," said Muina, who brought home a silver medal in art. "I was interested in the counterculture movement that started then. Decathlon has put me with people that I can talk with and they care about what I care about. We were a team."
Email Davis Lundy at davislundy@aol.com.