My son Peter, who is nearly 11, is a huge sports fan, and has been his whole life. He is also a sports blogger, but he hasn’t posted much lately. I need to encourage him to blog about the tournament, especially since he will be watching it, reading about it and thinking about it for the next three weeks.
His favorite sport to both play and watch is basketball. So he was superexcited to watch the NCAA Selection Show on Sunday to see the announcement of tournament bracket. He told us that he has been waiting for this moment since October when he previewed the whole tournament using a mascot-based system.
After watching the presentation of the brackets and analysis (CBS, not ESPN, as he is not a Dick Vitale fan), he was ready to fill out his bracket. We went to ESPN.com and quickly discovered that you needed to be 13 to register for a bracket. He went to Sports Illustrated for Kids and declared their bracket lame.
For the past several years I have participated in pools that used Yahoo Sports brackets. Last year, I even let Peter fill out my bracket for my work pool. So I joined a group of UNC fans (of which Peter is one), and created a bracket for Peter. He filled in all his picks quickly, armed with the knowledge from the Selection Show. His final four picks are Louisville, Memphis, Villanova, and Carolina. He suffers from that common malady of Carolina fans, that causes him to pick Duke to lose early and Carolina to win the whole tournament. I accept this as a sign of his independence. But I have been surrounded by so many Carolina fans living in Chapel Hill, this doesn’t really bother me.
I will update his progress as the tournament goes on. And hopefully he will too.
