Over the course of six weeks, the Math Team competed in the 2020 AreteLabs/AMC Mini-Madness competition, an online national contest, and won the title of national champions.

The team beat schools from Pennsylvania, Georgia, Texas, Kentucky, Florida and Illinois as it advanced through the competition head coach Steve Goodman said in a phone interview.

“It just got more and more exciting,” Goodman said.

The competition was set up as a bracket, and each week was a new round against a different school. Every week, team members took a new 30-minute test, consisting of seven or eight questions. Each team’s total score was comprised of the sum of the top five individual scores, Goodman said.

“What showed off the depth of our team was that it was not always the same five people,” said Goodman. “In fact, 15 different students, at one time or another, scored in the top five, including freshmen, sophomores, juniors and seniors.”

As the competition progressed, the Illinois Mathematics and Science Academy, also known as IMSA, was winning each round on the other side of the bracket. The teams met in the sixth and final round, with the Glenbrook North Math Team winning 29-21. 

“It’s especially exciting because there are a couple people on IMSA’s math team who used to be on [our] math team when they were freshmen,” Goodman said. 

Previously, this competition was only offered every fall, but another one was held this spring because many state competitions were canceled due to COVID-19. 

“The best we ever did was the fall of 2018 [when] we made the final four in the country.

 “So it’s really exciting to come back and win the whole thing this spring,” Goodman said.

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