Who is Andrew Kreitz?

Huntington Beach High senior made it to the final round of the ‘Jeopardy!’ teen tourney, which airs today and Friday.The category is “Local Teen Phenoms”:

“An all-league athlete, this young man appears Ivy League-bound and has been seen in the past week on national television.”

If your answer -- in the form of a question, of course -- was “Who is Andrew Kreitz?,” you would be correct.

The Huntington Beach High School senior was one of 15 students nationwide to have been selected to compete in the “Jeopardy! Teen Tournament.”

Having won his quarterfinal contest last week, Kreitz on Tuesday night answered his way past two opponents to win the second of three semifinal matches and earn a spot in the final.

The tournament, taped at the Sony Studios in Culver City Nov. 14 to 15, began airing on Feb. 6. It culminates with a two-day finals event today and Friday.

Due to a contractual agreement with the show, Kreitz, one of three players to advance to the final, could not reveal the outcome of the tournament.

The teen competition has been one of the show’s most popular events each season for the past two decades.

In the past year, the “Jeopardy!” contestant-search team traveled across the country and interviewed more than 1,000 teens between the ages of 13 and 17, stopping at regional sites such as Boston, Cleveland, Memphis and Los Angeles.

Kreitz was the only competitor to represent California and the lone contestant selected west of Colorado.

That’s an incredible accomplishment for someone who at first didn’t intend to audition for the show.

“It was on a Saturday morning, and I really hadn’t planned on going,” said Kreitz, 17. “Mr. Anderson, who teaches English at our school, had encouraged me to go, and I ended up going.”

Fliers had been passed out in several classes at Huntington Beach High School. Josh Anderson, who teaches freshman honors English and is one of the advisors in the school’s Model United Nations program, thought Kreitz was the perfect fit for the show.

Several freshmen students from Anderson’s class, as well as other students, also auditioned for the show.

“I got to know Andrew when we sat next to each other last year, his junior year, on a flight to Washington, D.C.,for a national Model UN conference,” Anderson said. “He had this certain aura around him among his peers, and I learned first-hand during that flight just what a well-spoken, articulate, bright and highly educated young man he is. He won the gavel [prize] as best delegate in his committee at the conference.

“When we got these fliers regarding the teen “Jeopardy!” tournament, I thought to myself, ‘Who is the smartest person I know, one who’s knowledgeable about random trivia?’ And that was Andrew.”

Kreitz’s credentials as a student-athlete at Huntington Beach speak for themselves: He’s a team captain and all-league water polo player and swimmer, has a 4.56 GPA, is the school student organization’s commissioner of fundraising, chairman of the Huntington Beach City Youth Board, a member of the National Honors Society and a national semifinalist for a National Merit Scholar.

He’s also fluent in Cantonese.

Among the schools he hopes to attend are Harvard, Princeton and Brown of the Ivy League, and Georgetown of the Big East Conference.

Harvard is recruiting Kreitz for water polo.

“Of all the kids I’ve coached during my many years as a coach, Andrew’s among the top two or three athletes that blends great, overall athletic talents with an outstanding academic standard,” said Eugene Char, the water polo coach at Huntington Beach. “He embodies everything scholastics and athletics should be about. He’s a great leader.

“What’s incredible about what he’d done is that with all the demands of water polo and his extracurricular school activities, he’s maintained great grades. It’s no surprise to me that he did so well on teen ‘Jeopardy!’”

Kreitz aced that first audition -- a 10-question quiz -- held at South Coast Plaza. He was asked to come back the same afternoon to take a 50-question test at a Holiday Inn near the plaza. He passed that too with flying colors, then got to audition and interview.

“It was a mixed audition and publicity event for the show,” Kreitz recalled. “They held a mock game of ‘Jeopardy!’ for us. I found out sometime in mid-October that I had been selected for the show.”

Maggie Speak, the contestant executive for ‘Jeopardy!,’ said that of the 1,000 teens nationwide who made it to the final stages of the audition process, only 15 were selected for the show, plus one alternate.

The first day on set included the taping of all five quarterfinal games. On the second day, all three semifinal games were shot. Both days were school days for Kreitz.

Wins in the quarterfinals and semifinals have earned Kreitz a cool $10,000 -- $5,000 for each triumph. He admitted to having been “extremely nervous” during his quarterfinal game but said he got over those jitters by the time the semifinal round came.

Kreitz, along with a crowd of more than 120 friends, fellow students and teachers at Huntington Beach, watched his quarterfinal game on a wide screen set up at the school’s student center.

As a finalist, he’s guaranteed to win no less than an additional $5,000, the prize for the third-place finisher in the finals. The runner-up will be awarded a total of $25,000, and the winner of Friday’s finale walks away with $75,000.

“I really, honestly, had a lot of fun,” Kreitz said. “Not just because I won some money, but became the whole experience was really enjoyable.

“I knew the game pretty well. I know there are some avid viewers who watch the show all the time, but I’m not one of them. I tune in from time to time, though. It was fun to be a part of the show. The crew and everyone involved with the show were great.”

Kreitz said he nor the other contestants didn’t get to interact much with “Jeopardy!” host Alex Trebek, although he found Trebek to be “pretty funny, especially during commercial breaks, when he’d crack jokes.”

“We had to answer questions from categories such as history and science during the competition, and there were a lot of pop-culture questions,” he said. “I didn’t know a lot of those answers, and those pop-culture questions left so many of the contestants baffled. We apparently were more the bookworm type.”

As for his fellow contestants, Kreitz said there was a genuine rapport among the 15.

“I can’t emphasize enough how all my fellow contestants were extremely intelligent and very nice and supportive of one another,” he said. “There was a genuine sense of camaraderie. There were no rivalries or such. It was a really great group.”

Maggie Speak, the contestant executive for the show the past nine years, agreed.

“They were all exchanging e-mail addresses with each other,” she said. “I got to talk with them and listen in on some of the conversations they had in the green room, and they are a fabulous group.

“We got together some of the brightest kids with a wide range of interests but who were the same in many ways when it came to knowledge. You know, when you run into some kids out there in the world, you kind of lose hope in the future. After meeting this group, it changes your whole viewpoint. The future’s going to be just fine.”Huntington Beach High School senior Andrew Kreitz is one of three contestants in the “Jeapardy! Teen Tournament,” which airs today and Friday. A star in both academics and athletics, he is being recruited by Harvard’s water polo team. 20060216iupchgncPHOTOS BY DOUGLAS ZIMMERMAN / INDEPENDENT(LA)Andrew Kreitz, a Huntington Beach High School senior, excells in academics and athletics as a water polo player on the school team. Kreitz is a contestant on the Jeopardy! Teen Tournament which is airing now through Friday, February 17. 20060216iup7s5ncCOURTESY OF JEOPARDY! PRODUCTION (LA)Kreitz was able to spend a little time with host Alex Trebek.