The Resource Guide
A Founder Makes a Mistake
Many Decathletes are lucky enough to compete multiple times. I was lucky enough to have that chance, but not wise enough to take it: I dropped out of the program as a junior. Mostly, I was scared of giving a speech. The team I left behind went on to take second in the nation. When I returned as an incoming senior, with a different coach and new teammates, I was determined not to squander this opportunity a second time. That determination, plus a jaywalking ticket, ultimately led to DemiDec.
The First DemiDec Team
It’s hard to imagine how different Decathlon was in the 1980s and early 1990s. Curriculum booklets didn’t exist. Every event but Super Quiz was entirely research-based, and every team had to do all that research on its own.
Our new coach, Dr. Berchin, was a legend at Taft High School who had stopped coaching and then returned just in time to coach my year. When he first assembled us in his room, Dr. Berchin shared that he was coming back for only one reason—because he knew our team could win nationals.
We were unlikely winners, with no returners, no varsities and a late start. But he had gravitas; he had credibility. We believed him. We read the outlines together, methodically. We glanced through a brochure advertising a national competition in Newark, New Jersey—then set it aside. We had to win city before we could even start dreaming of winning state.
That summer, he sent us on research missions to local college libraries; he inspired us to form a study circle and teach one another economics from college textbooks. He motivated us not only to find the right facts to learn but to create efficient ways of learning them. In a very real sense, that’s DemiDec’s origin story. I composed miniature resource kits in different subjects, from chemistry to the history of the former Yugoslavia. They looked a little like DemiDec’s Cram Kits do now: big, bold headings, mid-sized print. Later we wrote our own quizzes in the different events. (We also hid relevant books at local libraries, but that’s a slightly more shameful story.)
The Moment and Past
In the weeks leading up the city competition, we studied. We rehearsed our speeches. We tangled with the school police. We debated dinner plans (until our parents began catering). But mostly, we studied—in our own rooms, sometimes well past midnight. Dr. Berchin had convinced us by then that if we tried our hardest we might win—but also that if we didn’t try our hardest, we would lose.
At Super Quiz, we tied for first place with our top rival, Marshall—a team with its own great coach and a fierce disposition. For ten days, we weren’t sure of the overall outcome. We were reduced to nervously drawing comic strips and projecting individual scores. We had a pool going. Then, on November 30, at the Westin Bonaventure, the official results were announced, one event at a time. By the fourth event, it began to look pretty good; when we took seven of the top nine individual spots, it was certain. We had scored 50,515 points, the first team ever to do so; Marshall, about 44,000. We had never seriously imagined breaking 50,000, had been aiming for 45,000. We were bewildered, overjoyed. A photographer snapped a picture in which half of us were off our feet and all of us were blurry with motion, even Dr. Berchin. We called it the Moment. We were on our way.
After that, we went on to win state and nationals. We had other moments, but they were all lower-case.
Along the way we became friends with our rivals from West; they mingled with us on stage in Stockton; it was the closest thing possible to a joint victory. Later they surprised us at the airport just before we left for Newark, bringing us a poster and wishes of good fortune. They didn’t know that we had tried to raise funds to bring them with us.
Our friendship with West underscored what had grown increasingly clear to us about the meaning of the competition. There’s no way to put this that isn’t melodramatic, nay, sappy: what mattered most to us was our time together. We had secretly painted our coach’s room, been arrested a second time, survived an earthquake. We had carried a toilet up a flight of stairs and put it on a seating chart. We had a special bond, a quirkiness. We had an inner alpaca.
From Decathlon to DemiDec
About six weeks after our national competition, I proposed to one of my teammates that we “make DemiDec real.” We were in the parking lot of a furniture store on a street called Sherman Way. We had just paid jaywalking fines at a Van Nuys courthouse. Before long, we were chanting what would become an early DemiDec mantra—focus on victory.
The next day we secured our coach’s blessing, and we were off and running.
That summer, we transformed our experience into an enterprise—working long nights, playing Ultimate Frisbee, drinking smoothies, and counting on our parents and our teammates for support. In mid-August, we were close enough to finishing that sent out our first informational mailing. ” In recent years,” we wrote, “Academic Decathlon has become a way of life.”
It had certainly become ours.
Our first product was imperfect. We didn’t know much about test-writing; I wrote mine without marking the correct answers, and my teammate wrote his without any distracters. Needless to say, my answer keys were off, and his distracters were comically bad. It was also a very small product: seventy exams, plus a couple speeches, math formulas, and impromptu topics authored at a vitamin factory. But schools gave us the benefit of the doubt, and many have subscribed to our materials ever since. For this, and for all subscribers old and new, I am profoundly grateful. Thank you for your support