MATHCOUNTS archive > VA Team is #1 in the Nation

She’s been teaching for 28 years, but this is only her second year as a MATHCOUNTS coach and in her first year, her team won the state championship and then she coached the Virginia team to a second place finish at the National Competition. Talk about a tough act to follow, but Barbara Burnett of Longfellow Middle School in Falls Church was apparently up to the challenge. She says, “My husband likes to say he enables my addiction to teaching. The reward of watching the level of kids when they come to you and see how they progress through this competition is tremendous.” 

In only her second year of coaching a MATHCOUNTS team, Burnett’s Virginia team won the National Championship May 10-13 in Washington, D.C., surpassing the second place finish last year. The Virginia team of Jack Cackler, Veronica Pillar and Eric Price of Longfellow and Thomas Mildorf of Carl Sandburg Middle School in Alexandria beat out Pennsylvania who finished second and 55 other teams from across the country. Individually, Price was third in the nation, Cackler was sixth, Pillar was 22nd and Mildorf was 31st out of the 228 contestants. The Virginia team was selected from over 80 students who competed March 24 in Richmond in a contest sponsored by the Virginia Society of Professional Engineers, TRW Inc., Virginia Tech College of Engineering, CORPRINT and Nabisco, Inc. 

Burnett attributes much of the team’s success to their work ethic. She notes, “They have a phenomenal work ethic. I don’t know many athletes, particularly at the middle school level, who work as hard as these kids do to develop their skills. We practiced two hours after school every Wednesday, two hours after school on Friday and usually three hours every weekend at someone’s home. They inspire each other and work so well as a team trying to beat out each other and be the first to solve a problem so they can be the one to explain it. That is one of the secrets to the success of the Virginia team the last two years. Three of the four players have worked together all year and the fourth player was from nearby, so he could join in our practice sessions and immediately became part of the group. The ability to develop those team interaction skills over the course of practice sessions is really important.”

Burnett says one of the hardest parts of being the coach for the Virginia team is finding new practice material. She says, “We have literally gone through every old regional and state MATHCOUNTS practice test that exists as well as every old statewide math test I could find. These kids are so smart and fast that they literally “burn” through the material. If the practice test instructions say to allow 40 minutes, they would be done in 15.”

Despite all the preparation, Burnett says nerves become a factor at the national level with the large size of the audience and media camera people right in front of the contestants during the competition, but she feels those aspects are counterbalanced by all of the other smart students the team got to meet and the friendships that are formed. She says, “I could see a change in all my team members, socially, just in the four days we were there because of the interactions they got to make with the other students.”

For winning the National Championship, the team members each win a $2,000 scholarship, a Compaq Presario computer, a Texas Instruments TI-89 calculator and a trip to the U.S. Space Camp. Burnett, as team coach, got a Compaq computer, as well. In addition, Price received an additional $4,000 scholarship for his third place individual finish. So what’s next for this team of MATHLETES? Burnett says, “I don’t think they know yet all of the options available to them with their phenomenal brains, but I’ve told them I want them to cure Alzheimers, cure cancer and invent a fusion reactor so energy will be for free.” Most of the students on the team are already taking advanced high school level courses and at least one student has already taken their math SATs and scored a perfect 800, so it is clear that only their imagination can limit their possibilities. For Burnett, it’s back to teaching 8th grade math to students with learning disabilities and honors Algebra and honors Geometry classes to future Mathletes. Of course, there is always the work of finding more math practice problems that can be used with next years MATHCOUNTS team, and after all, at least one member of this year’s championship team is eligible to compete next year. Now, what can they do to top this year’s performance? We’ll have to wait and see.


 

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