The Few, the Proud--the Know-It-Alls : Competition: The state’s best academic decathlon team from Laguna Hills High School is training hard for the national championship. Only the top squad from Texas is ranked higher.

LAGUNA HILLS —  Ready to exercise? OK, flex that left frontal lobe! Stretch that gray matter! C’mon, work that cerebellum!

How else would you expect an academic decathlon team to work out for a championship?

Actually, it doesn’t sound quite like that when the state champion Laguna Hills High School academic decathlon team meets to prepare for the upcoming national championships in Des Moines. But the team’s preparations are something like brain calisthenics.

From now until the start of the grueling three-day national competition on April 20, the nine-student Laguna Hills team--which bested 46 other high schools March 10 to take the state championship--will be studying almost nonstop in a bid to be crowned the smartest teens in America.

Much of the team’s preparation consists simply of cramming as much information as possible into their heads during marathon study sessions, which coach Kathy Lane said can last up to four hours a day before the event. Lane and the team’s other coach, Roger Gunderson, will also get the team ready for the contest with a series of tests and drills, throwing out questions at random.

“What’s the theme of ‘The Great Gatsby?’ ” Gunderson barked out at a recent team meeting.

With little hesitation, senior student Mike Lee, 17, responded: “Gatsby’s desire to recapture the past.”

At the study session, the students also quizzed each other in their specialty--American Indian history, the subject that helped earn them the state title--and in other subjects, using textbooks and loose-leaf notebooks so large that they could have held designs for nuclear weapons.

But despite the enormous volume of information they memorize, the three juniors and six seniors on the team are no more intimidated by the championship than they would be about a pop quiz, if their attitude and demeanor is an indication.

“My friends are more excited that I am, really,” Jay Kim, 16, a junior, said at a recent team meeting.

“Our parents are ecstatic,” added team captain Jeff McCombs, 18, a senior. “My parents are more excited than me.”

After all, it’s not as if the team hasn’t won before. The school has won the Orange County competition for four years running. In this year’s contest, as McCombs proudly pointed out, at the junior-senior level, “we had the largest margin of victory ever--3,700 points.”

And at the state championship in Bakersfield, Laguna Hills scored 45,361 points. The closest of the also-rans, El Camino High, fell 572 points short.

Based on those performances, Laguna Hills--the first team from Orange County to win the state championship in 11 years--has been ranked second in the nation. “Texas is ranked No. 1 in the country,” McCombs said.

But Julian Kingston, 17, quickly chimed in: “They’re not going to be ranked No. 1 for long!”

Jeff DeWit, a 17-year-old senior, added that the team does not feel at all intimidated by the team from Texas or any of the other participants. “In every competition, we’ve been a first-place team,” he said. “I think we’re the ones intimidating other people.”

Gunderson and Lane, who have put in hundreds of extracurricular hours to prepare the team for the championships, were also confident in their team. “They have the will, spirit and determination to win,” Lane said.

OK, so everybody’s confident. But doesn’t the team fear the national exposure or the expectations of parents or the burden of upholding the school tradition of championship academic decathlon teams?

“I think we thrive on pressure,” Kim said.

In that case, Kim should enjoy the national championship, because there will be no shortage of pressure. The first day of the brain-bending competition starts with an essay-writing contest, followed by personal interviews in which students are judged by their off-the-cuff answers.

Kim predicted that he will do well in the interview segment, even though there’s no way to prepare for it. The judges “ask questions about your activities, your future plans, your character, your personality,” Kim said. “They can ask you anything.”

The interview segment is followed by a speech competition, in which contestants are judged on their oratory.

The second day begins with morning-long testing in social science, science, mathematics, economics, language, literature and fine arts. The competition ends with a high-pressure “super quiz,” a two-hour question session in which teams compete against each other. Day Three is devoted to awards presentations.

The team is grouped into three levels, based on grade-point average. McCombs, Kim and junior Ryan Sakamoto, 16, are in the “A” group. The “B” group consists of Lee, junior Todd Faurot, 16, and senior Jack Dietz, 17. Kingston, DeWit and senior Bill Fischer, 17, are in the “C” group. No girls signed up for the team this year, though girls have competed on previous Laguna Hills teams.

The team is confident because each member is skilled in different disciplines. For example, Faurot excels in fine arts--”He’s one of the best piano players I’ve ever seen,” Kim said--while Lee does best in the super quiz segment and essay writing, in which he was ranked first in the state. DeWit said he is best in the speech competition, while Dietz boasts medals from the state competition in math and science.

Faurot said the whole team takes advantage of cumulative knowledge through question-and-answer drills and testing.

“What one person knows, everybody should know,” he said. “The biggest reason for our success is we put the team ahead of ourselves.”