How to Create a Young Basketball Group Bracket
A tournament is a time-honored way to end a season. Perhaps the most famous is the NCAA Basketball Tournament, which occurs each March. In it, teams from all over the country are seeded in a bracket system. The team that goes undefeated wins the tournament. If you are running a youth basketball group, you can set up your own tournament bracket for your teams to determine a champion.
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Instructions
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1
List out the teams in the league on a piece of paper. Order them from your best team (the first seed) to your worst team (the last seed)
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Draw an even number of horizontal lines on a piece of paper that correspond to the number of teams you have. For example, if you have 32 teams, draw 32 lines. If you have 31 teams, still draw 32 lines. If you have an odd number of teams, you will always draw the next even number of lines. The lines should just be long enough to write the team names.
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3
List your best and worst team on the top two lines and draw a vertical line to connect them. List your second-best and your second-worst teams on your bottom two lines and draw a vertical line to connect them. Continue this, listing your third-best and third-worst on the two lines underneath the first two, and your fourth-best and fourth-worst on the two lines above the last two, until you've listed all your teams and have drawn vertical lines between the listings. The vertical lines represent the games in the first round of the tournament.
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Draw vertical lines from the horizontal lines. This is where you will list the winners of the first-round games. There should be half as many lines are you initially made. Draw vertical lines connecting these horizontal line (between lines one and two, three and four, five and six, and so on) to represent the second-round games.
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Continue building your tournament tree in this way, drawing horizontal lines from all vertical lines to designate the winner of each round and then new vertical lines between the winners to designate the games in the next round. The tree should build until you are left with only one horizontal line coming from your last vertical line. This team will be undefeated and the winner of the tournament.
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6
Transfer the bracket you created to a large dry erase board and post it in the gymnasium where play is taking place. Update the board with the winner of each game so your players can see who they'll play in the next round.
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Tips & Warnings
If you have an odd number of teams, for example 31, you will still draw 32 lines to begin with. List the best team on the first line, but list "bye" on the second line. Since you have an odd number of teams, the best team automatically gets to go on to the second round. Then your second-best team would play your worst, you third-best would play your second-worst and so on.
If you prefer, you can do an online search to find software that will do a lot of the work for you.
References
- Photo Credit basketball image by aline caldwell from Fotolia.com
