Marriotts Ridge’s two-time county champion Math Team kicked off their 2023-2024 year with a new roster. The new team displayed some of their talents on the 27th of September during the first county meet at Mt. Hebron High School.
Every year, many seniors, some star members graduate, leaving vacant slots open for new members from various grades to join and prove their skills at the county level. Although the team advertises itself through posters across the various math rooms, a major avenue in which new members join the team is to seek the club out themselves. One new member of the Math Team for the 2023-2024 season, junior Ariana Calin, spoke about how she found the club herself.
“I wonder[ed] if there was a Math Club, and I searched it up and there was… I like math, and I want to get better at it, so I [joined],” Calin said.
Calin is one of the many new members of the Math Team who found their way to the club through their love of mathematics. With a slew of new members for the Math Team, preparations for the first meet were allowed to begin.
Given only a few weeks from the start of school to the meet, Mr. Flynn, the coach, and sponsor of the math team, devised a plan to construct the team for the Howard County Mathematics League (HCML). Although there are almost sixty members of the Math Team, only twenty are allowed to attend each meet. To assemble a proper first team, Mr. Flynn administered a pre-test to assess the skills of new participants of the team. With a list of scores to obtain a vague understanding of the skills of the unknown members of the team, the team of twenty would be selected to attend the meet on the 27th. Along with newer members, many older members were selected to attend the meet as well. These star members for the team include both captains, seniors Evan Tian and Jason Wang, and both captains in training, juniors Juho Bay and Kelly Liu. Both were the top-scoring sophomores last year, with Kelly being the highest-scoring sophomore in the entire county.
“I’m feeling quite nervous. It’s the first meet of the season, and hopefully, I can get a good score to benefit my team [in] winning,” Bay shared.
Going into the first county meet of the 2023-2024 season, the first iteration of the MRHS team was sent to Mt. Hebron to take place in a competition with every other Math Team in the county. The top victors of the meet would be decided based on scoring from various rounds of written tests.
“[Our biggest rivals are] Centennial and then River Hill. For the last two years, we’ve been the top three in every individual competition,” commented Mr. Flynn.
The pressure was on the MRHS meet team to show how they stack up against the competition, and especially outperform the other two superteams.
Following the electrifying first meet of the season, results were released for all to see. Scoring thirty-four out of a possible fourty points, the MRHS Math Team scored extraordinarily with a score that would usually win most meets. The exception to this was Centennial High School. The Centennial team had a near perfect score with four members scoring perfect on the individual portion of the meet. Although the MRHS team was unable to edge out Centennial’s team in the end, certain highlights from the meet came directly from the MRHS team itself. For instance, the MRHS team was the only team where every one of the twenty members that were at the meet, scored at least one point on the individual section out of six. Even without winning the meet, Coach Flynn holds that the first meet was a successful one for MRHS.
“It was good, we scored thirty-four out of a possible fourty points… Most meets, thats going to be good enough to win, but Centennial was outstanding,” Coach Flynn noted.
Moving on from the first meet, the MRHS Math Team as a whole prepares for the next meet at Atholton High School on October 18th in hopes of surpassing Centennial for the first time for the season.