It’s officially March, meaning the Madness is about to begin. Is your office always looking for ways to get your team members involved and feel celebrated? March Madness is one of those times of year where it feels like everyone can get involved, whether they are sports fans or not. But, if you’ve been assigned the Manager of Fun and tasked with planning the March Madness celebrations for your office, you might be coming up empty.
Fear not. We’ve got four ideas, that while not final (ha!), might be just the alley-oop for you to slam-dunk your planning.
Can’t Beat the Classics
Kind of like it feels inevitable that UConn will be in the tournament every year, it’s inevitable that in an office March Madness party planning blog post, creating brackets will be mentioned. This is the simplest and most common way to get people involved. There are a few different ways to go about this:
- Printing brackets to be filled out by hand
- Digital brackets can be created online through sites like NCAA or Yahoo
We suggest having everyone do two brackets—one for the men’s tournament and one for the women’s (Hello! Double the chance to win!).
You’ll also need to come up with a scoring system and a prize for the final winner. Maybe it’s bragging rights, or maybe it’s a gift card to their favorite coffee spot—this one is up to you.
Maybe You Can Beat the Classics…?
Another possible activity is one that plays on the traditional bracket, but instead of selecting teams based on winning records or stats, have participants make all selections based solely on the mascot. This is perfect for the office contingencies who aren’t as hep on the actual basketball side of March Madness.
This one might take a bit more leg work, but you can create a bracket in a tool like Canva that includes the mascots of all 68 teams with no other identifying information than a small image of each that can be moved through the bracket. See the example below.
Everybody Loves Their Team
While there are only 68 teams selected for each bracket, men’s and women’s, it’s no secret that people have pride in where they went to school. Make each Friday of the month a “College Colors Day.” Have employees wear their school colors and celebrate their favorite college teams, whether they are in the tournament or not.
Final Four Finger Food
This is another idea that everyone in your office can get behind, whether they are into basketball or not, because who doesn’t love a little snack? For the Friday before the Final Four games, have people sign up to bring a finger food that plays on the names of the teams in the final four matchups for both the men’s and women’s brackets, their mascots or their school colors. For example, someone could bring in “Ralphie’s Buffalo Chicken Dip” if the University of Colorado was in the final four for either bracket, “A Husky Puppy’s Chow” for UConn, “Bruin-schetta” for UCLA or even a fun punch like a “Blue-Raspberry Devil” for Duke.
Planning events that will take place over three weeks of basketball can feel a bit overwhelming, but we hope these ideas have helped you zero in on a game plan. We wish you three weeks of buzzer-beating fun and may all your brackets be winners.
Looking for more ideas? We created a similar post a few years ago that has even more suggestions for you!
