Sometimes one plus one does equal three, as was the case when McNee, a basketball coach, met Mandekic. When Mandekic, a math teacher, told McNee how hard it was to get students excited about math at a gathering, he suggested, "Why not throw in something they enjoy, like sports?" "You are kidding!" Mandekic dismissed his idea at the moment.
The idea of mixing basketball and mathematics got its first shot two years later, when Mandekic and McNee, the now colleagues - who had launched a tutoring non-profit - were invited to run a summer-school program for kids who'd failed Grade 9 math at Vanier School.
When the students showed up for their first day, they weren't exactly thrilled. Over the next few hours, Mandekic and McNee gave the kids techniques to improve their shooting while also helping them calculate their field-goal percentage - which, in turn, taught them math knowledge. At the end of the game, the winning team was determined based on which group had the highest total percentage and had done the most efficient math. "When the bell rang, they were so focused on collecting their data and figuring out which team won that they didn't leave," says Mandekic. The classes, later named BallMatics, soon spread to other schools.
Later, McNee and Mandekic established a private school called Uchenna. At the school, kids with excellent basketball skills study all subjects, train at their sport and work part-time helping out with the BallMatics after-school programs. For the school's first graduates, the value of BallMatics is clear: all of the 16 boys landed university scholarships for their performance in the classroom, not on the court. "The school's commitment to academics is the key reason for our success. The coaches would bench students who didn't keep up in class." Abbott, one of them, says, "At Uchenna, we were student athletes, after all, not athlete students."
