Man, when that email hit my inbox yesterday morning, I almost spilled my coffee. TSSAA finally dropped the official bracket for the Boys Basketball State Tourney next year. 2025! Crazy how time flies. Been doing this bracket deep dive since the ’22 season, feels like routine now, but the first peek still gets me jazzed.
First Thing Was Just Opening The Attachment
Seriously. They sent it as a big, ugly PDF. Just a plain list, division by division, with schools and regions thrown together. My job? Make sense of the mess. Started by copying everything over into my big spreadsheet – call it my Bracket Bible. Color-coded the whole thing: blue for Division I, red for DII, you know? Makes it less of a headache.
The Real Work Began: Matching ‘Em Up
Had to hunt down each team’s regular season schedule and region finish. Took hours. Some small-town schools don’t update their sites much, so it was phone tag time. My desk became a mountain of sticky notes like:
- Call Coach Smith re: East Valley finish? Playoff tiebreaker?
- Check Ridge City final standing vs Maplewood?
- DII Region 4 champ confirmed? District site said one thing, Twitter said another…
Lunch was cold pizza, forgotten while I squinted at scores.
Building The Actual First-Round Matchups
This is where the bracket rubber hits the road. TSSAA lays out the basic structure, but seeing who actually plays whom… that’s the golden info folks want. Plugged those teams into the first-round slots. Took me forever to double-check. Highlighted the big-time first-rounders:
- Division I, Class AA: Oak Ridge @ Germantown. Oof, tough road trip right out the gate for Oak Ridge. Germantown’s gym is a nightmare to play in.
- Division II-A: CPA hosting University School. State tourney regulars, early on? Gonna be wild.
Then Came The Angry Emails
Hit publish on the post around dinner time. Barely finished my soup before the notifications blew up. Two coaches already hollerin’. One claiming his region seeding was wrong, another mad about travel distance. Had to dive back into my notes, cross-check with the official TSSAA document email again. Turned out one guy misremembered a tiebreaker scenario. Fixed one tiny thing in the DII-B bracket, reposted a correction. Always happens.
Job Done, But Whew
Ended the day staring at that finished bracket graphic on my screen. It’s satisfying, you know? Turning that PDF chaos into something folks can actually understand. Makes folks start arguing, dreaming about upsets, marking calendars. That’s the whole point. My back hurts, eyes are blurry, but yeah… ready for February 2025. Bring on the games.