Sometimes one plus one does equal three, as was the case when Dave McNee met Claudia Mandekic 14 years ago. McNee was at a dentist appointment in Toronto when he chatted with Mandekic, who was studying to be a teacher. When she told McNee what a headache it was to get students excited about math, he made a surprising suggestion, "Why not throw in something they enjoy, like sports?"
The idea of mixing basketball and mathematics got its first shot in 2011, when the colleagues were invited to run a summer-school program for kids who'd failed Grade 9 math at Georges Secondary 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 about fractions（分数）. The winning team would be determined based on which group had the highest total percentage and had done the most efficient math. "When the bell rang, they were so fixated on collecting their data and figuring out which team won that they didn't leave," says Mandekic. "I realized we might be onto something."
The classes, later named BallMatics, soon spread to other Toronto schools. "I was terrible at math," says Duane Douglas, an 8th grader. "But once I started BallMatics and realized the sport I loved was directly tied to math, it made me a lot better at it. Every time I played basketball, I was thinking about math."
McNee and Mandekic have established a private high school called Uchenna Academy since 2019, where kids with excellent basketball skills can study all subjects, train at their sport and work part-time.
The value of BallMatics is clear: last year, the boys landed university scholarships for their performance in the classroom, not on the court. McNee and Mandekic believe the school's commitment to academics is the key reason why it's been a winner.
