Special to the North San Antonio Times

Eighth graders from the San Antonio Academy MATHCOUNTS team broke into the trophy level by placing third out of the 54 teams competing in this year’s regional competition Feb. 16. Team members Tim Brown, Reagan Mycka, Owais Said and Wes Yancy turned in an outstanding performance for Academy students, who have placed in the top 10 for each of the last three years.

“I’m very proud of our San Antonio Academy mathletes,” said Mike Hansen, MATHCOUNTS SAA coach. “They have worked very hard to accomplish the goal of achieving our best performance to date as a team.”

Hansen introduced the program, offered as an elective course, at the school three years ago. He has been involved in the MATHCOUNTS program since 1984, coaching teams from Wood and Eisenhower Middle Schools and Alamo Heights Junior School.

The MATHCOUNTS competition, held at UTSA, consisted of three official rounds: the sprint round, in which students had to complete 30 problems in 40 minutes; the target round, with eight math problems presented as four pairs of problems completed in six minutes; and the team round, which allowed the four-team “mathletes” to work together on 10 problems in 20 minutes.

MATHCOUNTS is a national math coaching and competition program that promotes sixth-, seventh- and eighth-grade math achievement through grass-roots involvement in every U.S. state and several territories. The program stimulates student interest in math by making math achievement as challenging, exciting and prestigious as a school sport.