See who hangs on

Last March, Connor Finnegan of Acton, with his mother, Kathy, at the video camera controls, prepared his five-minute audition for the show "Endurance," a program on the Discovery Kids network in which teenagers compete in athletic games and survival skills in a rugged location.

Finnegan was dressed in his Acton-Boxborough Regional High School marching band uniform.

It was the beginnning of an adventure in reality television for Finnegan, now 16. Not only did he make it onto the program, he has lasted through the first half of the season. He is one of 10 contestants, including three Massachusetts teenagers, still in the running. Secrecy rules bar him from disclosing how far he and the others go in the second half of the program's season, which begins Saturday.

The network receives 10,000 audition tapes for 20 spots on "Endurance" each season, so back in March, Finnegan knew he needed to come up with something that would really make him stand out.

"I figured I could be 'Endurance' 's first band geek," he said, explaining his decision to do the audition tape dressed in his band uniform. "I talked about who I was and why I wanted to be on the show. Then I played some AC/DC on my electric guitar.

"A producer called me a few weeks later and said they liked my personality but they needed to see another tape with more action in it," Finnegan recounted. So on the next tape he did a stunt that involved slam-dunking a basketball while jumping off a trampoline. He also lifted weights and hit golf balls -- all while dressed in his band uniform.

The strategy worked.

Notified that he'd made it to the top 40 candidates, Finnegan discovered a challenge just as great as the ones he would eventually face in the competition: keeping it secret. Having told many of his friends about the audition tapes, he suddenly found himself in the awkward position of not being able to say another word about his prospects on "Endurance."

"Kids kept asking me whatever happened with those tryouts, and I just shrugged and said I didn't really know," he recalled.

Even when he found out he had been chosen as a contestant, Finnegan had to keep silent on the topic throughout the final weeks of his freshman year of high school.

In late July, accompanied by his mother, his brother, and his maternal grandparents, Finnegan flew to Fresno, Calif., for filming. The 20 finalists met with producers, wardrobe specialists, and other network personnel, and then trekked into the Sierra National Forest for their 18-day competition.

Finnegan said that "meeting the other kids was one of the best parts of the whole experience."

"It was so cool because we were all in the same situation," he said. "Everyone was nervous but also kind of excited. You're out there with no technology or distractions, so you start bonding instantly. I got to be friends with everyone so quickly."

Of course, there are problems with forming attachments in an elimination competition. "We all got to be together for one night on site knowing that the very next day four people were going to have to go home," Finnegan said. "Each time someone gets eliminated, if it's not you, it's one of your new friends."

Two of those friends are still competing, however -- Taylor Sico-McNulty of Boxford and Alex Carignan of Leominster.

Carignan is a freshman football player at Leominster High. Sico-McNulty, a freshman at Masconomet Regional High School in Topsfield, loves to perform onstage in school and in community theater. She is now Finnegan's partner on the show.

The first elimination round involved balancing on a beam suspended over a lake. Finnegan came in third among the boys. "My biggest fear going into the competition was that I would be eliminated on the very first day. Once I realized I wasn't going home right away, I started to really have fun," he said.

Unlike the prototype reality show "Survivor," on "Endurance" the kids compete in pairs rather than in larger teams. The focus of the second day was finding out who they would be partnered with. Finnegan ended up matched with Darci, a girl from Baldwin, N.Y. No sooner did the teams pair up than the host of the show presented them with their first pairs competition.

"Each pair was tied together and then tied to a huge knot," Finnegan explained. "It was a race to untangle the knot. At the end, it came down to my team and one other. We were neck and neck and I knew I was about five or 10 seconds from elimination. It was scary, but we just made it. So we were one of the final seven teams. That was when it really hit me that I was actually on 'Endurance'!"

Several days of physical challenges, interpersonal frictions, alliances, and schemes followed. Finnegan said the contestants "slept on wooden bunks in treehouses and took freezing showers."

"When you watch the show on TV, everyone looks clean and well-kept. But we were actually pretty grungy. It was so dusty up in the mountains. We would take showers and then get dirty again just walking back to our huts."

As for being on camera nearly 24 hours a day, Finnegan adjusted to that fairly quickly.

"At first it was weird being filmed all the time. You'd be talking and suddenly there would be a camera or microphone shoved into your face," he said. "The big rule with reality TV is never to look at the camera. After a day or two you get used to it." Other rules for on-air behavior include not swearing and not referring to brand-name products.

One thing that teen culture and reality shows have in common is the potential for high interpersonal drama, so when you put teenagers on a reality show, emotions heat up quickly. Finnegan just smiles congenially when asked about the other kids and says that he "got along with everyone well, even though other people had their differences." His mother was quick to address the less wholesome side of the experience.

"There was definitely some nastiness," she said. The producers and story writers "deliberately put the kids in situations that are designed to increase the drama and tension."

During one memorable episode, the kids learned that some teams would be broken up and rematched, a first for "Endurance." It was then that Finnegan ended up as Sico-McNulty's partner. Friction among the competitors ensued, and after that episode was broadcast in November, Kathy Finnegan said that "people were coming up to me in the grocery store saying, 'I can't believe what they did to Connor.' "

The Finnegans returned to Acton in late August.

"The first few days back, I missed the routine of being on the show," Connor said. "Then school started, and it was really cool, with everyone asking me what it had been like. Episodes air on Saturday nights, so every Monday, most of my discussions at school are about what happened on that week's show."

With his sophomore year now in full swing, Finnegan is busy pursuing his extracurricular activities. The marching band season ended after Thanksgiving; now he is rehearsing for a winter performance of "Once Upon a Mattress." The "Endurance" experience fueled his interest in a career on camera -- "maybe as a host or a sports announcer" -- but also introduced him to the behind-the-scenes side of the business.

And despite the show's inherent teen drama, the cast has remained a tightknit group. There has been a number of mini-reunions and "this summer, all 20 of us are going to try to get together for a big reunion," said Finnegan.

The prize for the winning team, according to "Endurance" 's official website, is "the trip of a lifetime to Hawaii." Whether the next mini-reunion will take place between Finnegan and his teammate, Sico-McNulty, in the Aloha State remains to be seen -- when the season finale is shown this spring.