PENDLETON — Grant County’s only mathlete team, the Grant Union Protractors, placed third in a regional competition at Blue Mountain Community College on Saturday, Feb. 17.

The team is in its inaugural year of competition and has been meeting twice a week as a middle school math club since September.

“I wanted to start just a math club,” said Protractors coach Anna Field. “So we have a middle school math club that meets twice a week working on various math skills, but … we take those same students and compete in a MathCounts competition series.”

The club studies math concepts that can be challenging, such as the Pythagorean theorem, prime numbers, radicals, perfect squares and perfect cubes, at their bi-weekly meetings.

The Protractors were pitted against nine other teams consisting of sixth-, seventh- and eighth-graders in the Northeast Oregon Chapter Competition.

“We were so excited to find success there,” Field said.

Along with the team competition came an individual competition that saw one of the Protractors finish in the top 10 overall. Team captain Artemis “Arte” McKnab finished seventh out of 34 competitors.

The competition was a numerical blitz that started with a sprint round of 30 questions that participants had 40 minutes to answer — all without the use of the TI calculators each competitor brought with them. Next was the calculator-allowed target round that consisted of eight questions split into four mini-rounds of two questions competitors were given six minutes to answer.

The team phase came next, with teams of four mathletes working together to complete 10 problems in 20 minutes with the use of a calculator. Questions would progressively get more difficult as the teams made their way deeper into each round.

The individual competition, called the countdown round, saw the top 10 individual competitors face off in a one-on-one ladder-style bracket in which the lowest scorers work their way up through the bracket until only the top two competitors remain. Competitors had 45 seconds per question and answered with a “Jeopardy”-style buzzer response.

“Just the fact that we got a student to that countdown round, I think her dad (assistant Protractors coach Ryan McKnab) and I were just — our jaws were on the floor and we had tears in our eyes, we were so excited,” Field said.

Both McKnab as an individual and the Protractors as a team just missed out on a March appearance at the state competition. Only the first place team and the top two individual finishers qualified to compete against the rest of the state in Salem.

The team’s third-place finish — only two places removed from a berth in the state competition in their inaugural year as competing mathletes — is an accomplishment that has stunned the number-crunching freshman head coach.

“I was impressed,” Field said. “Our students blew us away.”

Field is hoping that the Grant Union Protractors’ success will encourage other schools in Grant County to form teams of their own. Then, instead of driving for hours to get to a chapter competition, local schools could host one right here.

“Our huge goal is — and this might be a little bit lofty — our big goal is, why do we have to go to Pendleton? We (could) have our own chapter in Grant County and (then) we’ve got teams from Dayville, Monument, Long Creek, Prairie, Grant Union,” Field said. “Why can’t people be driving from Nyssa to Grant County for a chapter competition?”

Despite not making it to state, the team did bring home some hardware. Field said she hopes the Protractors’ third-place trophy is displayed right along with all of the sports trophies in the school’s trophy case.