Matt Pikaard is the Latin teacher here at Parkway Central and has been for the last six years and the Latin teacher at Parkway North for four years before that. En route to becoming a Latin teacher, Pikaard got a bachelors in Classics and History from Mizzou in 2008 and a Masters in the Art of Teaching from Washington University in St. Louis in 2010.

While teaching Latin has always been his primary focus, Pikaard has never been one to turn down sponsoring a club that is nerdy.

“I am a nerd and like all nerd things, I even ran a chainmail club at North,” Pikaard said. “With the chainmail club we just hangout after school making chainmail.”

While there is no chainmail club (yet) at Central, Pikaard is the sponsor of four clubs/activities: Dungeons & Dragons, Latin Club, Scholar Bowl, and the new eSports team.

The Dungeons & Dragons club has been active for about three years now and has been decently popular.

“It usually starts the year with some help, but eventually breaks off into different groups running separate campaigns,” Pikaard said.

Dungeons & Dragons will be fairly easy to continue over Zoom as only one person needs to have everything, while everyone else only needs dice in order to role.

Latin Club is just a group of Latin students who enjoyed hanging out after school in Pikaard’s room.

“It started out as a group that watched moves about Roman history, and we re-enacted wars between Celts, Romans, Germans,” Pikaard said. “Over time it just became a board game club.” Latin Club was already waning in popularity last year and would be hard to continue online so as far as online school goes its future is up in the air.

Scholar Bowl is essentially really intense trivia taking place between two teams.

“Scholar Bowl just takes all of the different scholarly fields and asks really specific questions about stuff that you have probably learned at some point, but goes into very specific things that in order to be good at it you have to know them very well,” Pikaard said.

Practices for Scholar Bowl are pretty laid back, as the best way to learn all of it is just go through questions packet-by-packet.

Practices were set up the same as tournaments, essentially scrimmages for an hour after school one day a week, and outside of practice the most effective way to improve is through frequency lists and Quizlets. Also, tournaments generally take place in person, but due to COVID-19 all in-person tournaments have been canceled. However, there is a chance of some tournaments taking place online, but nothing is for sure yet.

Last but not least, there is the new eSports club/team. The games that the eSports team would be competing in is League of Legends (5v5), Rocket League (3v3), and Smash (1v1). However, it might take some time to sort out the teams and practices, as well as complying with MSHAA standards, so the team might not compete until the spring season second semester. All of these clubs are just a glimpse into what Pikaard does, as he also hand-painted all of the miniatures used in the battle re-enactments.

Optime Magister.