The Barrington High School math team has added another state championship to its impressive 23-year run.

Barrington recently outscored public and private schools from across Rhode Island to win its 20th state title in the last 23 years, and 11th in the last 12 years. 

Barrington’s A team, which featured Kamran Pahlavi, Yiming “David” Xiong, Zachary Weinstein, Vignesh Peddi, Ruoyu “Athena” Gao, and Iris Yang, knocked off Wheeler in the state championship finals. 

Barrington High School math team coach and math department chairman Bob Marley said he was very proud of his team’s effort.

“The last couple of years have been challenging as a teacher. This has been nice, a very sweet ending to this season, because we did lose to Wheeler in the regular season. They had a lot of talent,” Marley said. “We lost three out of four times to them, but our kids came through in the end and won the state championship. 

“We’ve done this before. It’s happened a number of years where Wheeler has had great teams. But we pulled it out in the end.”

The Barrington High School A team finished the regular season in second place, two points behind Wheeler, while the Eagles’ B and C teams also finished in the top-five. The A team scored 315 points, while the B. Team was third with 245 points and the C team was fifth with 206 points.

“We had so much depth this year that we would have had five out of the top 10 teams in the state, but we can only take one team to states,” Marley said. 

“We had three teams finish in the top five in the regular season. We would have had two of the top three teams in the state, but we had so much depth that I literally could have had five teams go to states. There were meets this year where my C team was leading after three rounds, and the A team eventually pulled it out, but there were times where even the B and the C team were in first place through a meet. It definitely gave them competition.”

Barrington High School boasted five out of the top 10 students in the state during the regular season. Tenth-grader Xiong finished second with 64 points, and also had the highest score for any sophomore in Rhode Island.

Weinstein, also a sophomore, finished tied for fifth with Barrington Middle School eighth-grader Iris Yang — each scored 63 points. Yang’s score was the highest in the state for any freshman or eighth-grader. 

Pahlavi, a junior, scored a 61 and finished in seventh place, while Peddi, a sophomore, scored 57 points and finished in 10th place in the state. 

“It’s a culture we’ve created. It becomes part of their routine. They come out every Tuesday to practice. In some cases we do practice more than once a week,” Marley said. “Not all teams across the state are disciplined to do that, but we practice from the time school starts all the way through May. I make sure that everybody comes to practice — it’s not just about the A team — so that we build that depth and we have that feeder program, so in future years the kids are ready to step up.”

Coach Marley said this year’s math team ranks in the top 25 percent of all the championship teams over the last 23 years.

“And what’s unique about this team is that they’re young and deep. So we have about 75 percent of the students are coming from eighth, ninth and tenth grade. We only have eight students out of 30 that were in the 11th and 12th grade. So, young team, very talented. One of the most talented teams youth-wise that I’ve had in a long time. I think that’s a tribute to some of the work we did with the middle school,” he said.

“There was a period of time where only about seven students were going out for MathCounts. Connie Oswald and I went down and we helped Sarah Orrall, got the numbers back up to 30 or 40 students coming out for MathCounts. And we’re seeing the fruits of that now.”

Coach Marley praised the contributions of all his team members, and made special note of senior co-captains Lucy Dreier and Hannah Bai. 

Barrington has compiled an overall record of 332 wins, 10 losses and three ties over the past 23 years.

“I’m a competitive person. I love the competition of it,” Marley said. “I love getting kids ready for math competitions, AP exams, SAT tests or baseball games, it doesn’t matter. I just love competition, and I just want our students to do the best and be the best. And I think they do help each other out in a way that pushes them. When you have an environment like Barrington High School where we’ve actually had a number of kids move here from Cranston. I actually had two out of my five A team members move here from Cranston. It’s not only the math team, it’s Science Olympiad. Between those two teams we had four very talented kids move to town over the last couple of years, because of what we’re offering, not only for the classroom but the extracurriculars like math team.”