on the hilltop
Celebrating 50 Years,
WA’S UPPER SCHOOL MATH TEAM IS ARGUABLY
winningest team of any kind
IN ACADEMY HISTORY
by Neil R. Isakson
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Best Athlete. Biggest Techie. Most Likely to Succeed. High school superlatives are generally associated with a school’s graduating seniors. However, there’s one moniker at Worcester Academy that the students have earned consistently, almost overwhelmingly, over the last decade: Best Math Team. It’s the reason Boston magazine named Worcester Academy “Best Math School” in 2006 and the reason WA’s rigorous math program, its faculty, and its students have merited high praise for having won local, regional, and national math competitions—40 to be exact—with 32 of those championships having come since 2006!
Just imagine: >> Nine Worcester County Math League (WOCOMAL) Varsity Championships: 1983, 1990, 2006, 2008, 2009, 2010, 2011, 2014, and 2015. >> Nine Massachusetts Math League (MML) Small School Championships: 2006, 2007, 2008, 2009, 2010, 2011, 2012, 2013, and 2014. >> Ten Massachusetts Association of Mathematics Leagues (MAML) State Championships: 1995, 2006, 2007, 2008, 2009, 2010, 2011, 2013, 2014, and 2015. >> Seven New England championships: 1992, 2006, 2007, 2011, 2013, 2014, and 2015. >> One Princeton University Mathematics Competition: 2013. >> And, much earlier, two Annhurst College Competitions: 1968 and 1969 (Paul Blanchard ’69, currently a math professor at Boston University, has his name on the 1969 trophy, as does math teacher and Math Team Coach Clarence Barthelman). And, those are just the First Place championships! Richard Yanco, a member of the Academy’s math faculty and a longtime coach of the math team, is rightly proud of the math team’s accomplishments. Mr. Yanco, who arrived at Worcester Academy in 2003, led the team for 11 years before finally passing the torch to current
head coach and math teacher Therese O’Garr, whose team notched several championships in its own right in the one year she has been at the helm. Mr. Yanco, meanwhile, remains keeper of math team history, as well as the math team’s amazing stats. “We’ve done pretty well over the years,” a sheepish Mr. Yanco says, in what can only be described as a colossal understatement. “The last 12 years have been the most successful period in the history of our math team, and we probably have more championships than any other school.” According to Mr. Yanco, anywhere from 30 to 55 students join the math team each year in what averages out to be about 8 percent of the Upper School. At times, they have competed in as many as four math leagues depending on interest. And that, he says, has been part of the secret to their successes. Participating in more leagues means more competitions, he says. And, whereas some school teams may have only four meets a year, WA often has more than double that. “The math team works really hard, and we do a lot,” he says. “You might liken it to a soccer team that has only four games playing another team that has 10 or more. The team with the most experience is going to win.”
As a result, the Worcester Academy Math Team typically doubles the score of the next best small school, he said, noting that WA had been tops overall among schools of all sizes in 2013. In addition to Barthelman, O’Garr, and Yanco, other head coaches for the WA Math Team have included Donald Bloom and George Delaney.
ADDITIONAL SUCCESSES In December, the Math Team placed Second nationwide in the 2013 AMC/Interstellar High School Mathematics National Championship. More than 500 schools and 13,000 students participated in the contest. The WA team also finished in 20th place in the 2014 Four-byFour Competition, a national mathematics contest administered by National Assessment & Testing. Additionally, Worcester Academy is regularly ranked among top teams at the Worcester Polytechnic Institute Invitational Math Meet, and academy students frequently outpace their peers in Massachusetts Math Olympiad competitions, and on the American Mathematics Competition (AMC) Test, the most rigorous high school test in the nation, sponsored by the Mathematical Association of America. Worcester Academy
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