As someone who doesn’t watch an awful lot of professional sports, much less any at the college level, the idea of meticulously choosing and tracking teams I knew nothing about seemed tremendously unappealing. Although I actually play basketball, I’ve never really seen the attraction to tracking and watching teams. In fact, every year, when the month of March rolled around I would dread having to listen to the blabber of March Madness and upsets. Much like many women in the country, I couldn’t care less about who was in the final four or how Zion Williamson was carrying Duke. However, that changed when I was asked to join a bracket.

I’ll admit, I was a bit skeptical when a friend told me her idea of a March Madness competition. We had both never made a bracket, or even voluntarily watched college basketball. Although I wasn’t totally sold on the idea as a whole, especially because many of the people I would be competing against were also girls, I researched the top predictions for the tournament of 2019. It’s a bit embarrassing, but I felt sneaky, cross-referencing and choosing teams for my bracket, and although I only had surface-level knowledge of college basketball, I felt pretty proud and confident about the teams I had chosen. It was almost an empowering feeling, finalizing my bracket and watching my competitors do the same. I had never invested even ten minutes into something like this, and was able to grasp a small bit of the thrill a fantasy football drafter may have. Thus, at midnight on Thursday night, March Madness had begun.

I’m a very competitive person, which might be one of the reasons that I enjoyed myself so much. It’s fun to put your bracket in the hands of the teams you chose and not have to worry about doing anything else. I even got the official NCAA app in order to see how I was ranked. I found myself able to engage in conversations that I wouldn’t be at all interested in even a week beforehand, and enjoyed the feeling of finally knowing what was happening in the grand world of a male-dominated sports society. Tracking the scores of one-point upsets or having to defend my bandwagon choice of Duke winning it all gave me a taste of the nail-biting A’s games my brother and dad would watch and the heartbreak of a  2014 Yoenis Cespedes trade.

Even if I don’t see myself becoming a die-hard college basketball fan in the near future, I can acknowledge how the experience has opened my eyes to a world which I never dreamed to be a part of. It may seem silly, a seemingly life-changing March Madness adventure, but I still found myself learning new things and enjoying the experience. I would encourage every woman to throw a bracket together next year, whether or sports fan or not, to enjoy a tournament which millions of people around the country have staked their paychecks on.