NCAA Men's Basketball Tournament

One of the best weekends of sports has passed us by with the second and third round of the NCAA men’s basketball tournament being played in arenas all over the United States, from Pittsburgh to Seattle and in between. The tournament consists of 68 teams. The first round consists of four teams playing in a “play-in game”, the winner guaranteeing a game in the second round. Teams are seeded from one to sixteen and the tournament includes four regions (East, West, South, Mid-West). On Thursday and Friday, sixteen games were played beginning at Noon and ending around midnight. The winners of the games on Thursday and Friday played on Saturday and Sunday, respectively. By Monday morning, only sixteen teams were remaining.

Anything can happen in the forty minutes played between the two seeded teams. It doesn’t matter if you are one of the best teams in the country (a two or three seed) or a university that does not get much publicity in the sports world (a twelve or a thirteen seed), any team can be beat. The best overall team is the team that advances on to the next round; it is not necessarily the team with the most talent.

America gets emotionally involved in the NCAA men’s basketball tournament with the use of brackets. The overall tournament is printed on a landscape page and America fills out a bracket, predicting the winners of each game and its national champion.  Even President Obama reveals his bracket on a special TV show on ESPN. Unfortunately, people do place wagers on the games but plenty of people fill out brackets for bragging rights in the office, at school or in challenges on social media.

This weekend coming up is the fourth round, referred to as the Sweet Sixteen, which is played again on Thursday and Friday. The fifth round, referred to as the Elite Eight, is played on Saturday and Sunday. The four teams remaining play in the Final Four, which this year is the weekend of Easter, with the championship being played the Monday after Easter. The Final Four generally sells out crowds of over 70,000-90,000 fans. This year the Final Four is being played at Lucas Oil Stadium, home of the Indianapolis Colts, a NFL stadium. If you are a fan of basketball, these couple of weekends is full of excitement, drama and greatness.

Vocabulary:
1) tournament (noun)- a series of contests, between competitors who compete for a prize
2) arena (noun)- a level area surrounded by seats for fans where events are held
3) region (noun)- an area that does not have boundaries but has known characteristics
4) publicity (noun)- attention given to someone or something
5) landscape (noun)- all the visible features of an area
6) wagers (verb)- risking a sum of money against someone else's on the basis of a future event
7) greatness (noun)- the quality of being renowned

Vocabulary Activity:
Write four sentences about your favorite weekend and include four of the vocabulary words from above!

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Grammar Point:
The use of parenthesis is frequent in bloggers. It is used when you want to de-emphasize a part of writing. They would not normally fit in writing but you want to include it anyway. To use parenthesis, remember not to capitalize or punctuate the material, even if the material itself is a complete sentence.

Grammar Activity:
Directions: Now add one more sentence to the vocabulary activity. Write a sentence successfully using a parenthesis. Refer back to the blog above for help!