Highland Park High School ranked among the best in the state last year in a fast-paced, team sport that requires talent, skill, and lots of hard work.
But this state championship action didn’t happen in a stadium, and the star players weren’t surrounded by screaming fans.
The silence, team member Spencer Luu remembered, was deafening. You could almost hear students thinking at the 2025 UIL Academic State Meet in May, when Luu, along with fellow HP seniors Lakshmi Vemula and Andrew Li, led the math team to a top finish.
The students placed first in general mathematics, which challenged competitors to answer 60 word problems on everything from algebra to calculus and statistics in just 40 minutes.
They came in third in calculator applications, which included word problems, geometry, and strings of operations, such as {(-6.47)(0.989 + 7.91 – 5.47)(-7.4)} + 83.4.
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And that was just number 4 of the 70 questions that students had to solve with a handheld calculator. The problems got progressively more difficult.
Highland Park placed second in number sense, an 80-question exam that students had 10 minutes to complete. Problems had to be solved mentally, without a pencil or paper. Make notes or erase, and answers were marked as incorrect.
“I was definitely happy with how we did,” Luu said. “Obviously, you do wish we could have swept the whole podium, got first in everything. I was really happy about the whole journey because I made a lot of new friends, just being in math team.”
Highland Park has had a decade-long tradition of successful math teams, coach Andy Speir said. But this was the first time he could recall HP placing in the top three in every event, a feat he attributed to strong performances by Vemula, Li, and Luu, who have qualified for state each year since they were freshmen, as well as underclassmen Adrian Gu and Henry Zhu.
“Three seniors, four years in a row to make it to state, that’s really rare,” Speir said.
The math team’s performance, combined with finishes from other academic teams, propelled Highland Park to second place overall in the UIL 5A State Academic Contest.
Another standout was HP’s science team, which placed first in the state competition. Individual team members ranked first, second, and third, an accomplishment that coach Wenzen Chuang called “amazing.”
“They’re on another level,” math-team student Vemula said of the science team.
It may have been a competition, but Vemula said that team members learned not just from teachers Speir and David Alvarado, but also from each other and students at different schools. HP collaborated with several other teams during a workshop in east Texas before the state championship.
And HP’s students didn’t linger too long over their mistakes — they laughed about them.
“After we take the test, discussing how we did gets really funny,” Vemula said. “We’ll realize that one of us made a silly mistake, and we’ll be like, ‘oh my gosh, how did I do that?’ Or there’s always one question that none of us can figure out, and then we just keep thinking about that.”
Sometimes competitions go well. But at the next, she said, HP may hit rock bottom.
“If the results were predictable, then competition wouldn’t be any fun,” Luu added, “because you would know who would win.”
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