Hans Woyda – Round One

While last week’s friendly was a gentle introduction to this year’s Hans Woyda, the stakes were much higher on Tuesday for the first official match against Godolphin and Latymer. A slip-up could cost us our place in the main knockout competition, and it was clear that the SPS team of Sanjay Iyer (Fourth Form), Alex Barea (Sixth Form), Kanishk Srivastava (Lower Eighth) and Neil Prabhu felt a responsibility to start things on the right foot. Only Neil had actually been involved in the competition before, and even then he insisted that he hadn’t, the memory has long since faded from his mind (which is marginally worrying given that it was only a year ago). However, once the G&L team arrived it soon became apparent that their Year 13 was the only one with any previous experience as well, meaning that the two sides were on a level playing field for the start of the match.

We kicked off with a challenging set of starter questions which tripped almost everyone up right out of the gate, but the team recovered quickly from the setback, giving us a clean sweep on the second set of starter questions and a significant early lead. It was still far too early for complacency, and G&L were a lot closer on the geometry section, but SPS kicked into gear for the mental arithmetic questions with an almost flawless performance, even managing to steal some points from the opposition. Both sides worked extremely well on the team question and arrived at an almost identical set of solutions, but SPS managed to slip one more in just before the deadline which earned them an extra bonus point.

After the obligatory sandwich break (which was supplemented this time by crisps and cakes as well in an attempt to lure the visiting team into a food coma), we started the second half of the match with a comfortable 20-point lead. However, Hans Woyda is a fickle competition which can turn on you at a moment’s notice, so I wasn’t going to let our team get carried away just yet. Indeed, it seemed as if G&L were hitting their stride, and they managed to keep pace with our boys through both the calculator and the algebra sections. But, if there is one area where we have always been particularly strong, it is undoubtedly speed, and so it was that we didn’t lose a single question in the race section to the opposition. At the final whistle, the team had more than proved their worth, storming to an incredible 56 – 26 victory.

We look forward to Round 2 next half term against Southbank International School!

Written by Samuel Cullen-Hewitt, Teacher of Mathematics