Lakeside Middle School’s seventh-grade academic pentathlon team has earned second place overall at the 2021 United States Academic Pentathlon, held on May 21 through a virtual competition. This follows their win as the highest scoring team in California during the state competition in April.
Only two teams are invited to the national competition from each state, making Lakeside the second team from Orange County this year to advance to the national competition. Fairmont Private Schools‘ Historic Anaheim Campus was the second team to represent California.
Individually, Lakeside students won 19 medals, and within the subject categories, two students earned perfect scores on the science portion of the test. The following students represented Lakeside at the national competition: Elijah Wilson, Audrey Huang, Marissa Huang, Syon Srawan, Meili Nishi, Veda Deorukhkar, Diya Khanna and Roman Shulpin. Additionally Simoni Jagota, Haley Ferguson and Jongmin Chae competed individually.
Team members, who participated in the county and state competitions, include:
Seventh Grade
- Julia Alcantara
- Roman Shulpin
- Elijah Wilson
- Audrey Huang
- Marissa Huang
- Meili Nishi
- Simoni Jagota
- Diya Khanna
- Kyra Hoppenworth
- Ellie Park
- Veda Deorukhkar
- Isabella Sodorff
- Syon Srawan
- Aditya Singh
- Mandy Zhou
- Allison Shin
- Hailey Khetiya
- Ryan Robertson
- Rosalin Rocha
Eighth Grade
- Saniya Ali
- Ronit Mathur
- Haley Ferguson
- Mia Dzinic
- Daniel Crawford
- Jongmin Chae
- Damien Torres
Coaches
- Danielle Morris
- Michael Clark
- Zane Pang
The United States Academic Pentathlon is a five-event scholastic competition for middle school students, providing the benefits of Academic Decathlon along with the challenges of rigorous team and individual competition. This year our Academic Pentathlon group consisted of 19 seventh graders and 7 eighth graders. The team met twice a week from December to April learning about this year’s theme: The Cold War. Students read the book Spies: The Secret Showdown between America and Russia by Marc Favreau, they listened to music from the 1960s-1990s, learned about the major political figures during the Cold War, and much more.
The pentathlon areas of concentration are language and literature, fine arts, science, mathematics and social science. Academic pentathlon teams comprise students in three different grade-point average categories: Honor (those with GPAs of 3.80 or above), Scholastic (GPAs of 3.20 to 3.79) and Varsity (GPAs or 3.199 or below). The categories are designed to ensure all students have an opportunity to compete.
You can find the full list of team and individual honors at https://usad.org/Pentathlon/Pentathlon-Results.aspx.
Congratulations to our Lakeside Pentathletes!