Spring means lots of Foundation funding for student travel. This year, we committed to offsetting the cost of class-related trips for students traveling to Morocco (MENA senior seminar), Canada (AP Comparative Government), Phoenix (Math Modeling), and DC (We the People). The combined enhancement grants for these four trips total just over $57,000, all of which goes to reduce or eliminate the cost for participating students and their families.
The Foundation offset the cost of Mr. Benesh’s math modeling students’ travel to Phoenix, AZ for the 2018 SABR Analytics Conference by over $14,000. Among other activities, the students competed in the SABR Analytics Diamond Dollars Case Competition, which pits teams from colleges (and one high school!) across the country against each other in an analytics-based Major League Baseball operations decision.
Twenty-three teams participated this year. They were asked to evaluate the relationship between launch angle and exit velocity of batted balls. The winning MLWGS team created their own metric (RAP – Runs Added per Play) which they used in a simulation that they ran thousands of times in Python. A panel of judges that included MLB front office executives selected winning teams from four competing divisions. One Maggie Walker team took first place in their division, defeating teams from Cal Poly-San Luis Obispo, NYU, University of Alabama, and St. John Fisher.
MLWGS is the only school that can boast back-to-back winning teams, as they also triumphed in 2017. That’s on top of the fact that MLWGS is still the only high school ever to compete in the Diamond Dollars Case Competition. Congratulations to Matthew Haines (’18), Aditya Kannoth (’18), David Winters (’19), Reid Jesselson (’18), and Yug Rao (’18), who made up the winning team.
Make a gift to the 2017-18 Annual Fund to help ensure that we can continue to commit to providing significant funding for opportunities like these that make MLWGS a unique place to learn.