The waiting -- oh, the waiting was terrible.

Small groups of teenagers in somber suit coats and dark skirts huddled together, expressions of subdued terror sweeping their faces. It was the interview portion of the 2006 GCI Alaska Academic Decathlon. Forrest Townsend and Jordan Phillips, sophomores on the Ketchikan team, worked hard to cheer each other up.

"This is so exhilarating," Townsend said, spreading out his arms as if trying to convince himself. "Intellectual environments are so inspiring ."

"Luck," Phillips answered, "is a fabrication."

It made no sense, but it seemed to make them feel better. Others weren't so collected. Eva Rowan, a member of the Klawock team, stumbled out of the interview room.

"I shouldn't have gone first," she whispered, leaning against the wall for support. "I totally didn't know one question. I just rambled on about anything."

She collapsed into a chair and closed her eyes as Peter Stanton, a freshman on the Ketchikan team who would go on to win the Super Quiz, walked bravely toward the door. Dressed in a suit coat, his glasses shining in the overhead light, he looked like an older, smarter version of Harry Potter. He sat down carefully in front of the three judges, who peered out at him as if ready to record his every mishap and stumble. Stanton swallowed and answered his first question and then a second. His foot tapped, tapped, tapped beneath his chair. But his voice was clear and even. When asked how Shakespeare might relate to the modern world, he didn't even flinch.

"I think Shakespeare would be a blogger," he said eagerly. "He'd be out there on the edge."

When his long, agonizing seven minutes were over, he waited in the hallway for his comment cards. The judges praised his responses but noted his lack of eye contact.

"Good, really good, Peter," coach Sean Powell said.

"Oh my gosh," Rowan interrupted. "Don't tell me you totally went in there with your tie all squashed-looking."

Stanton nodded and lifted his neck as Rowan barreled in and patted his slumping tie back into shape.

"There," she said. "It's over now -- isn't that great? Isn't that totally the greatest?"

NICE TO BE A NERD

The Academic Decathlon, in its 21st year, is the Olympics of smarts, testing students in seven areas: art, economics, language and literature, math, music, science and the Super Quiz -- a sort of grab bag of tough-topic trivia.

Each year, the subjects revolve around a theme. This year's theme, the European Renaissance, offered up a mouthful of unpronounceable names along with tricky alliances, anatomy exploration and a few polynomial equations thrown in for fun.

Teams include nine students and as many alternates as desired. Each team, however, must include three students from each category: honor, scholastic and varsity, corresponding to A, B and C grade-point averages. According to Ketchikan coach Sean Powell, this encourages participation from students of all ranges, not just the overachievers and the always-gets-an-A variety.

Competition consists of a series of tests, speeches and interviews spread over three days.

Ben Newman, a member of the winning Lathrop High School team in Fairbanks and also individual winner of the economics event, said his team begins preparing in July, when study packets arrive. Team members "devour" the contents and hold informal get-togethers until school starts, when they start meeting three times a week, building up to nightly sessions as regional and state decathlons draw near. When things get tough, they perk themselves up playing Pictionary and charades.

"We make nerdy jokes about the material," he said.

According to Hannibal Grubis, who with his wife, Joy, coaches West Valley High School, last year's winning team, students put in an amazing amount of time and energy preparing for the decathlon. He often holds what he calls "lock-ins," in which his team studies and takes tests past midnight.

"But you've got to understand that to these kids, learning is fun," he said. "They enjoy studying on Friday nights."

A big plus is that students learn from nontraditional methods, which gives many of the varsity (C students) an advantage. Many of these kids, he said, are smart but haven't figured out how to excel at school.

"They don't play the grade game," he said, "but that doesn't mean they aren't interested in learning. They just aren't suited for the structure of regular classrooms."

Powell said the decathlon program is comparable to a full semester at a liberal arts college. By breaking it down into smaller segments, teens learn how to translate something formidable into something manageable. When that happens, it's like a light going on.

"We start squeezing the juice out of their educational experience instead of having it poured down their throats," he said.

Students' self-esteem improves, along with their social skills. While school can be challenging, Powell doesn't feel it offers a chance to stare down the face of fear. The decathlon does. Every year, he said, students are afraid of at least one category.

"One of the students this year was terrified of the interview. She would have rather been drawn, cut and quartered," he said. "But once she did it, she realized that it wasn't that big of a stumbling block."

Too many teenagers, Powell said, don't do well in school because of peer pressure. "They know they're smart, but they don't want anyone else to know they're smart. They don't think it's cool."

"What we do is embrace the inner nerd," he said. "It's cool to be nerdy when you're with us."

SUPER-DUPER TEST

The hallways on the second floor of the Hilton Anchorage were filled with T-shirted students huddled together, reading note cards and yelling answers back and forth. Some played hacky sack, while others crammed handfuls of takeout food into their mouths. It was a half-hour before the Super Quiz, the big daddy of the decathlon, and the intensity was building every minute as teammates volleyed information back and forth.

"Dude, it's Michel de Montaigne."

"Nah, it's Miguel de Cervantes."

"I'm telling you, it's Montaigne, because, see here ..."

The Super Quiz is often compared to "Jeopardy," though the quiz questions are tougher and trickier. If you don't know the subject matter, you aren't going to be able to fudge your way through the answers. It's played in front of an audience, and between sessions it's noisy, with teammates shouting and cheering and stamping their feet.

Teams sit in folding chairs, one after another like train cars. The front person walks up to a table and sits beside an adult proctor (to discourage cheat sheets or answers inked on hands or shoes) and waits for questions to be read off. He then has seven seconds to choose one of five multiple-choice answers. Once pencils are down, the quiz master reads off the answer, and those who have marked it correctly raise their hands. After each set, chairs are rotated so those sitting in the back move toward the front.

And the questions? Here's a sample -- and oh yeah, you have seven seconds to answer:

"The Schmalkaldic League was a protective alliance of what?"

(Hint: The Schmalkaldic League was a defensive league of the Protestant princes in the Holy Roman Empire.)

By the middle of the meet, the teams were going wild between sessions, especially those close to the lead, hooting and hollering as they tallied points in their heads and then hushing down to silence at the beginning of each new round. There were grimaces and mouthed curses when the questions were particularly tough and a lot of "Oh, shoots" when a teammate missed a heavily practiced question.

But every question was tough, every answer tricky since the slightly demented persons who made up the quiz had a cunning sense of humor, placing like spellings and names together so that Gregory the VII and Gregory the VIII often followed one another. If you had studied sloppily and only recognized the Gregory part, you were pretty much up the Renaissance creek without a paddle.

It ended like a sporting event, with cheers and hugs and wild, high-pitched yells. Lathrop High, the winners, will go to the nationals in San Antonio in April. West Valley placed second, and Craig City School I was third. There were congratulations and hoots and a few laments: "If only I had done this instead of that."

Mostly, though, it was a bunch of teenagers letting loose after three days of tests and stress, three days of cramming facts and food, three days of too little sleep and too much socializing.

Ben Newman from the Lathrop team summed it up nicely:

"Learning is this weird abstract feeling. It's pretty dang neat."

Daily News reporter Cinthia Ritchie can be reached at critchie@adn.com