Venomous Agenda Memoirs

Chapter 6: Square Root of the Morale

Even though the principal left the football head coach position vacant until August, the appointment of the new football head coach went unnoticed simply because it was a foregone conclusion.

Fast-forward to November 2022. It seems like the athletic cuts ran deep, since the Venomous Agendas were mediocre in all fall sports, be it cross-country, swimming, volleyball or football. For the last one, the booster club had to pick up the tab for the players whose parents couldn't pay for 2 uniforms. By the time the AMC12 was finished, this extracurricular disaster ate at the morale of the math team, but even a middling quiz bowl or debate team is unremarkable among the student body. So unremarkable that not even players on the academic teams are clueless about how the other teams performed despite some of the players on it being close friends to each other.

The principal shows up briefly at a math team practice subsequent to the AMC12, telling the team about the situation of the school's extracurriculars:

"Ladies and gentlemen, things have been going badly for Venomous Agenda athletics. It now falls on you, mathletes, to accomplish what the sports teams couldn't" Glen proceeds to tell the mathletes. "However, do you have any plan to accomplish this?"

"Color me biased, but if we make it to the USAMO, it will send a strong message to the rest of the state that rural regions can and do perform at the highest mathletic levels" Gen answers the principal.

"I get that you two markedly improved over the summer, Éliane and Gen, but the USAMO is a pipe dream. We must find another way to accomplish what the sports teams couldn't" Trent points out, looking at both Éliane and Gen.

Right now, there is nothing to make the town proud of us. Debate and quiz bowl both fly under the radar, and it appears that it would not help us live with academic excellence in an ungendered way the way mathletics would, Glen muses, while realizing that the savings made in making professional development targeted were used for equally targeted HVAC repairs instead.

Of course, I don't want this season to end that quickly, but at the same time, we must pick carefully any further contests we enter this season! Éliane muses, while she searches for potential contests to enter that could be done remotely and don't interfere with potential AIME and possibly USAMO participation. Speaking of USAMO, qualifying for it requires potential entrants to score a minimum index score based on the AMC12 and 10 times the score on the AIME.

"But why focus on mathletics? Why not quiz bowl? Or, for that matter, debating?" Bo, another mathlete, asks the principal about this focus on mathletics as an extracurricular priority by the principal.

"Attending debate tournaments, especially in-person, is much more expensive on a per-student basis than mathletics or even quiz bowl because debate tournaments tend to be multi-day and quiz bowl tournaments are one-day. Or so I could glean from an analysis of expenses incurred by both teams. It would then follow that mathletics is the most cost-effective way to fill that void" Glen explains about the financial aspect of running all 3 academic teams.

"Now I understand"

The school the VAs call the "neighboring parish" also runs into the same financial problems, especially since debate and quiz bowl are new to them this season. As such, no one expects much out of the neighboring parish in any of these activities even though they might have a handful of smarter kids on hand. But just a handful of them.

Éliane, the black female mathlete, then keeps looking for potential tournaments for the Venomous Agendas to attend and held remotely. With all the caveats this carries: no discussions on the test items may take place online until a certain deadline is past. Notwithstanding that southwest Louisiana is functionally cut off from the rest of the country as it relates to mathletics.