Olympian

Olympian High School
Location: Chula Vista, CA
Club Presidents	Dylan Rafael Yamzon
Coaches	Kristine Yau
National Appearances	HSNCT: 2015-2018
Program Status	Active
School Size	Unknown
NAQT Page	link

Olympian High School is a public high school in Chula Vista, CA. The Eagles (dubbed so because of their school mascot) are active participants in the SoCal QB circuit and are especially active at NAQT-sanctioned events. Along with Eastlake, Olympian was a key early supporter of pyramidal quizbowl questions in their local Academic League.

Metro Conference Academic League

Olympian has dominated the Metro Conference Academic League since 2012 (and was a strong year-to-year competitor before that), winning the league regular season and tournament every year, often in an overwhelming fashion.

Current Players

The 2018-2019 team

• Arjay Micheal Graslie
• Ashten Abalos
• Cameron Espinoza
• Chloe Casares
• Daniella Garnica
• Dantae Garcia
• Dante Hernandez
• Dee Batina
• Dylan Yamzon
• Frank Castillo
• Hannah Batina
• Iris Elmido
• Jacob Sarinas
• Jessela Tatad
• Joseph Alvarado (mgr.)

The 2022-2023 team

• Lila Careaga
• Leo Figueroa
• Martin Costa
• Mina Guaderrama
• Nalu Raney
• Nour Ali
• Rianna Cain
• Sarah Chang
• Theodore Kirkpatrick
• Toyo Sison
• William Pitiquen (mgr.)

Hosted Tournaments

Hosted Tournaments	Date	Teams
OASIS	01/13/2018	10
OASIS II	10/06/2018	14
OASIS III	10/29/2019	8

History

The Olympian Quizbowl team was started in 2011, and since then the team has been led by a series of coaches, such as Ken Boulton and Kristine Yau. Debra Hake served as the coach for the team since 2019 until her untimely passing in December 2023, after which Kristine Yau once again took up coaching duties.

During their infancy, the team largely stayed within their local circuit, competing only at the Sweetwater Union Academic League Tournament, of which they are still an annual competitor. Aside from two UCSD tournaments in the fall of 2011, the team steered clear of competition outside of their local league.

Starting in 2013, however, they began playing at various SoCal tournaments such as Capstone Invitational, Irvine High Operation Pandemonium III, Arcadia Xanthic Only Live Once Tournament L'Affaire, and Warhawk II Novice Invitational. Though they performed somewhat poorly in those tournaments, the team still produced some players of note. Ironically, a person named Kyle emerged as one of the team’s first leading scorers, consistently achieving 40+ ppg, despite usually being on the losing side. To round out this early team, players by the names of Mark, German, Brandon, Abraham, and Thomas put up good numbers against fierce competition in Arcadia, Santa Monica, Canyon Crest, and Westview, among others. Since then, the school has remained an active competitor at SoCal QB events, with fluctuating performance.

The 2014-2015 season marked the beginning of Olympian’s rise as a competitive team in the SoCal region. The team, led by juniors Kyle M. and Thomas B, along with senior Mark T., won a tournament for the first time, sharing that victory with BASIS Scottsdale A at the Arizona Quizbowl Association October Invitational. This season also featured the team’s first appearance at HSNCT, and although they placed 113th and ended with a record of 5-5, that performance set the stage for the team’s greatest achievement. Throughout that season as well as the 2015-2016 season, the team continued to attend various tournaments, notably placing 1st at the 2016 Western High School Invitational and 2nd at the 2015 Sacramento Fall Tournament. In that season, the team also attended HSNCT, though with similar results as the first.

Thomas and Kyle could lead the team to decent placements, but they fell short of the performance necessary to do well in HSNCT. With the end of the 2015-2016 season, the two graduated, and Olympian lost their two top scorers for nearly 4 years. In the 2016-2017 season, the team was relatively quiet in the SoCal scene, though they had a notable outlier result in the 2017 Red Rock Invitational, where they placed second behind Ed W. Clark High School. However, the importance of this season lies not in the results of the team, but rather in the development/acquisition of new players. Players such as Athina Rosure, James Scherrer, Manuel-Aguilera Prieto, and Ocean Zhou began blooming into the core team that would take Olympian to its apex. Highlighted in the fact that in the 2017 HSNCT, Olympian B, which consisted of these players, Zachary Blanton, and Hearth Yager, placed 97th as opposed to Olympian A’s 154th, the team was gearing up for its greatest HSNCT run.

Olympian Quizbowl reached its peak in the 2017-2018 season. For the first time in its history, the team was consistently placing within the top 4 at every tournament they went to. Led by the previously mentioned players and rounded out by others like A. J. Payumo, Dayo Amisu, Jake Blankenbecler, and Kiara Pornan, the team displayed remarkable consistency and skill through an impressive 21 PPB and a notable lack of negs. In the 2018 HSNCT, the team placed 51st with a record of 8-5, the highest rank that Olympian had acquired thus far. Following this season, however, the team has been unable to reproduce those impressive results. Adapting to both the graduation of the 2017-2018 Olympian A team and a coaching change, the team continued to play strongly in the 2018-2019 season, ranking no lower than 4th at all the tournaments they attended. Despite this, they missed HSNCT for the first time in four years and did not return for quite some time.

The performance of the team from 2019 to 2021 was marked by a gradual decline and confusion about the competitiveness of the team. The 2020 Sweetwater Union Academic League Tournament marked their first loss in the Metro Conference Academic League since 2012, with varsity losing to Otay Ranch. In the county, they accidentally put their A team in the JV bracket and the B team in the varsity bracket when registering for CCA PPT V. Despite the waning strength compared to the 2017-2018 team, the team still managed to produce strong players such as Henry Morales, who dominated on science against stiff competition from national contenders like Arcadia, Del Norte, and St. Margaret’s Episcopal.

However, despite Henry’s departure at the beginning of the 2022-2023 season, the team saw a meteoric rise in both activity and capability to perform against the top teams in the region. With the core trio of Martin Auriel Costa, Dylan Rafael Yamzon, and Dantae Garcia (and under the leadership of the former two), the team once again established itself as a top team in the region, with stunning upsets against many other strong schools. In addition, this season saw the acquisition of many freshmen that would bloom into the core of their varsity squad, including Arjay Michael Graslie, Iris Elmido, and Jessela Tatad. Once again, Olympianp placed high at every tournament they attended, including a notable string of 3rd place finishes - a “curse” that would follow the team into the next season. This sudden success garnered the attention of many throughout the region, with Yaj Jhajhria of Canyon Crest Academy claiming that they were “the fastest-improving team in SoCal”, something reaffirmed by their 4th place finish at the 2023 Southern California State Championship, where they tied with Rancho Bernardo.

Entering the 2023-2024 season, the team sought to set their goals higher - the last of which being the national stage, a place that the school had not returned to in 6 years, and a theater on which no one on the team had ever performed. To accomplish these goals, the team began seriously ironing out their weaknesses and honing their strengths. Martin, who was already considered one of the best fine arts players in the region, secured his lock on the subject while also placing particular emphasis on religion, mythology, philosophy, and geography - a trial also undertaken by Iris, whose unprecedented determination and passion quickly bearing fruit as she earned a key spot on the varsity roster less than a year into her career. Dylan set his sights on literature, easily the team’s weakest category for quite some time, and transformed that weakness into another strength while maintaining region-wide dominance on science - a subject also supported by Arjay, another rising star who earned a spot on varsity in only his second year. Finally, Dantae solidified his grasp on history, current events, geography, and sports alongside Jessela, the third sophomore to join varsity and someone who often patched whatever holes Dantae had in his coverage. In addition, this year also saw the recruitment of Toyo Sison, the fourth varsity sophomore who, though forced into varsity right out of the gate, quickly dedicated himself to studying literature in hopes of maintaining literature coverage for the young varsity squad.

And thus, with all the pieces set in stone, the Olympian team sprang into the SoCal scene with unmatched success. Breaking their “third-place curse”, the team scored wins against Del Norte and Canyon Crest Academy, two teams ranked top 15 in the nation throughout the year, and they managed to place 2nd in both of those tournaments. In online play, they defeated nationally recognized teams like William Fremd, Chattahoochee, and Yukon. Anomalously, the team almost invariably did this shorthanded, missing one or two varsity members in every tournament they played that year sans PPT VII, their nationals qualifier. And thus, with a strong season behind them, the Team of Upsets was ready to take on their biggest challenge, and they certainly lived up to their moniker. Despite having zero prior experience, the team went 8-2 in the prelims of the 2024 HSNCT, tied for the best record in SoCal and managed through tough wins against teams like Montgomery Blair and Winston Churchill A, two teams that would end up tied for 8th by the end of the tournament. However, tragedy struck in the playoffs, where two agonizing losses early on quickly knocked them out of contention. However, in spite of the premature end, the team still placed tied for 49th out of 320 teams, the highest placement in school history, and they solidified themselves as the best team in school history thus far.

Though the 2024-2025 season saw the loss of both Martin Auriel Costa and Dylan Rafael Yamzon, the team’s leaders and core duo, the future is still bright.

Internal History and Team Culture

The team has frequent meetings and is largely student-led, thus the team has had a strong team culture that owes itself to common experiences and specific changes made by the players themselves. Due to Ken Boulton’s coaching of the team spanning most of the team’s history, a Boulton and post-Boulton era are commonly held periodizations of the team’s history by its players.

The Boulton era is defined as the period when Ken Boulton coached it from 2011-2019. The era defined the team’s standard and potential. The team’s first peak performance, the 2017-2018 team, also occurred during this time. The era also set the precedent for many of the team’s practices and habits, such as emphasizing punctuality and “strategies” such as “stalling” and note-taking, which are still encouraged to varying degrees. The era also defined a specialization system, where players could specialize in science, literature, history, or geography. The RMPSS and fine arts subjects were distributed among players within those four subjects, according to student interest. However, some trends did emerge, such as science players often being made to study auditory fine arts because sounds are “vibrations in the air.” The movement of Ken Boulton from Olympian also led to a loss of players as well as the decline and eventual dissolution of the school’s Academic Decathlon.

The post-Boulton age saw a shift from coach-mediated practices to student-mediated practices, believed to have begun under the coaching of Kristine Yau. Since then, the chronology of the team has been largely influenced by the players themselves. What some players have dubbed the “Hakeian Reformation” occur during this period, defined by changes in team structure and public image since the Boulton age. The “reforms” include the creation of a team category specialization that includes the RMPSS and fine arts subjects to supplant geography as its own specialization. During these “reforms,” the team also emphasizes outreach, team building, and community building within their local circuit in an “Era of Diplomacy.” Emphasizing practices such as carding also occurred under the reforms. Notably, there exists a strong team culture and high level of interaction with alumni started during this reformation.

The 2023-2024 year was marked by the end of the Era of Diplomacy, with the Era of Eagle Expansionism. This era is marked by, but did not start, with a strong opposition towards "overly-hierarchical" team structures (ie., strong coaches, inept team captains, etc.), and attempts at shifting other teams' structures towards a student-operated system (the shared responsibility, club system largely observed at the county level). The broader contention between the culture of the local league and the Hakeian team structure sparked this shift, along with efforts to usher in an strengthened league that culminates in more district representation in county tournaments (with Olympian being the district's only representation for over a decade). Notable achievements of this ongoing era include Montgomery High School's shift towards becoming more student-led and understanding canon. Yet distrust and conflict still exists between teams that support this decentralized system and those who find success with the coach-led system.

Notable Quotes

• "Beauty is powers, powers beauty." (Henry Morales)

• "Can't neg if you never buzz." (Daniel Perry)

• "Merely enjoy the reality in which you live now!!!!" (Richard Manugid)

• "You can't cook if you don't have all the ingredients." (Dylan Yamzon)

• "Can we bring our own buzzers and like just do practice rounds of Quizbowl because if not I will literally die of withdrawal." (Arjay Graslie)

• "Eat, sleep, Quizbowl, repeat." (Iris Elmido)

• "Oh, first neg." (Jessela Tatad)

• "Don't make me do it, I'll embarrass y'all ;P" (Ms. Hake)