American college basketball fans from all walks of life gear up once a year for March Madness, the National Collegiate Athletic Association’s (NCAA) annual championships. Predicting the outcomes of the tournaments is a national, decades-long tradition, proliferating with the growth of the internet. CESJDS’ Sports Analysis Club is joining in on the action by running an intra-school bracket tournament, joining the estimated 100 million brackets made around the country.
The NCAA selected 68 teams on March 16, giving fans a few days to make brackets. The bottom eight teams will face off between March 17 and 20 to create a simpler 64-seed bracket. Various rounds will be held at universities across the nation, culminating in the NCAA women’s championship game on April 6 in Tampa, Florida, and the men’s championship game on April 7 in San Antonio, Texas.
Many people at JDS have been fans for years, including Jewish text teacher Rabbi Reuvane Slater, who said March Madness was a “religious” experience for him. He made paper brackets and went to great lengths to watch the tournament as a boarding student at the Talmudical Institute of Upstate New York in Rochester, where he managed to find a way to watch in 1985, despite the Yeshiva’s television ban.
“The [Sony] Watchman was a small little TV, and I bought it, used all my money, crawled into my closet in yeshiva and watched with clothing on top of me, trying to make sure that I didn’t get caught,” Slater said.
Slater started to pay less attention to NCAA basketball as his professional career began. However, he is glad to participate in JDS’ bracket tournament, placing second school-wide last year and within the top 175,000 nationally.
Sophomore Micah Brickman is co-president of the Sports Analysis Club. In that role, he started the online ESPN group for students and faculty to participate in the bracket tournament. He is very deliberate about his bracket selections.
“I start by selecting every high-seed, then I skip 16 seeds because it’s a statistical problem,” Brickman said. “Then for the rest of the teams, I just do research based on past experiences and match that up with how likely the team is to win based on stats…and I try to pick a few upsets.”
Brickman is not the only student who takes NCAA basketball and bracket-making seriously. Junior Ella Longman, a member of the varsity girls basketball team, has watched and followed college basketball and March Madness, both the men’s and women’s tournaments, for quite some time. She also said that watching basketball has always been a family affair for her.
“My mom started bringing me to games when I was only a few months old,” Longman said. “So, I’ve always enjoyed watching basketball, particularly college [basketball].”
As a frequent viewer of college basketball, Longman mostly bases her bracket selection on previous team performances against each other. When she was younger, Longman used to set her brackets so that her favorite team, the University of Maryland, won. This year, she expects Duke University’s men’s team to win.
Both Slater and Brickman also have favorite teams. Slater said that he has been a fan of St. John’s University since he was young because it is near where he grew up in Queens, NY. Brickman’s favorite team is the Ohio State University because his siblings are students there. However, he expects Auburn University to win.
These March Madness fans have high expectations for this year’s tournament. Regardless of who wins the tournament or has a better bracket this year, they are excited to connect with their friends and family, watching the game they all love.
“I always follow the whole tournament, but I don’t pay attention to my bracket typically that much,” Longman said. “…I think just the nature of the game is that there are some teams that are always really, really dominant, and there are some teams that aren’t.”
![Spring sports tryouts were held from March 3 to March 6. During varsity volleyball tryouts, players practice skills including serving, hitting and scrimmaging. Junior Ami Epstein hasn’t participated in any varsity CESJDS team sports before, and while he feels that it is going to be a challenge, he is ready for it. “I'm excited for the challenge and the learning curve,” Epstein said. “I also like that it’s [volleyball] a team sport.”](https://lionstale.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/03/IMG_5677-e1741654243130-900x1200.jpeg)
