The EHS math team took on regionals, but their scores didn’t add up to what they had hoped.

Math team placed second as a team at regionals located at SIUE, on Feb. 22, breaking an over

15–year streak of placing first.

Senior Ellie Viox, one of the captains for the math team said that while they were expecting to

get first, many people from the team placed individually, allowing them to go to state.

“You have to get first for your whole team to go to state, but we still have some people and

teams that have qualified individually,” Viox said.

Similar to other competitions, regionals for math team allows you to compete in up to three

events.

“There are individual tests, two-man competitions, 8-man competitions, calculator team, and an

oral presentation.”

Mollie Easley, the sponsor for the math team, said that individuals who place top three in their

event qualify for state.

“If we would have won overall… we would have all gone to state, which is what we’ve done

every other year,” Ms. Easley said.

Senior Josh Harris worked with Viox for the oral presentation. For this competition, one person

presents orally and the other writes other information on the board.

“When I approached the board to start writing as the presentation was starting, I became not in

sync with my partner, Ellie Viox, due to trying to use two different markers that were dried up,”

Harris said. “Due to our parts of the presentation being out of sync, we were marked off, with

these being the only points we lost.”

Harris said after their presentation, the judges threw the bad markers away and O’Fallon didn’t

have this problem so they only missed one point, while Edwardsville missed three.

Overall, even if this didn’t happen, there still wouldn’t have been enough points for them to

make it to state, Harris said.

Viox competed in senior individual precalculus test, senior team and oral presentation.

She got third individual senior, and while she was hoping for first, she’s still happy with how she

did and how the rest of the team did.

“Personally I would have liked to place first as an individual because I had done so the last three

years, but overall I’m fairly satisfied considering I get to go to state and I placed in every event

that I competed in,” Viox said.

Ms. Easley said it’s hard to get students to come to practice, which is twice a week, when

they’re involved in other clubs as well.

“We still have intelligent students and students that are capable, but I think that they just don’t

have time, they’ve been spread a little bit too thin,” Ms. Easley said.

Viox partially attributed its second place to O’Fallon’s amount of practice and the loss of last

year’s seniors.

“O’Fallon has been working really hard to improve and although we are almost always

successful, we graduated a really strong senior class last year and lack some depth.”