What Works- Mapping March Madness

What do you get when you cross March Madness with two basketball-crazed school librarians? A perfect opportunity to give teens a lesson in research, geography, and mapping skills.

Fans nationwide are glued to their TV sets when the NCAA Men's Basketball Tournament rolls around in March, but basketball fanatics in the Midwest are especially hard hit by this obsession. Our middle school in Holland, MI, right in the heart of Michigan State and University of Michigan territory, is certainly no exception. Add to the madness two middle school librarians who are graduates of archrivals Purdue and Indiana universities, and basketball becomes the main topic of conversation for students and faculty alike.

How do we put all that excitement to work? A few years ago, Kristi Karis, our school's world studies department chair, noticed students clustered around an NCAA tournament schedule on the library wall. Always interested in connecting school curriculum with student interests, Karis remembered a sports-related geography lesson. Instant collaboration! We decided to create a library bulletin board and contest related to the tournament.

The NCAA tournament, which pits the top college basketball teams against each other for the national title, is divided into four regional brackets, each with 16 teams. It provides a great occasion to sneak in a little practice in geography, as well as mapping and research skills, particularly for teenage boys, who are less keen on visiting the library.

By adding a large laminated map of the U.S. to our display, our students were suddenly able to pinpoint the locations of all 64 colleges on the "Road to the Final Four." On the map, we place small, round, red stickers on the cities of all participating colleges in the tournament. From each dot we attach a string, which leads to a USA Today article profiling that team. After the first round, blue dots replace red dots to identify the 32 winning teams. Later, yellow dots are placed over the towns of Sweet Sixteen winners and green dots over the Elite Eight. We use colored foil star stickers for the champion and runner-up teams. The legend at the top of the map explains what level each colored dot represents and allows students to track their team's progress. The students, who are eager to help, often post and update the display before school from game results found online or in the morning newspapers.

Capitalizing on their enthusiasm, we feature books on shelves below the bulletin board on subjects like improving basketball skills and strategies, biographies of basketball stars, fictional basketball stories, and sports poetry. The highlighted readings always make a fast break for the check-out desk. We supplement the map display with newspaper clippings or Web printouts of the tournament highlights, especially those of our local college teams and alma maters.

Initially, the display attracted more boys than girls. But in recent years, with increased TV coverage of the Women's NCAA Basketball Tournament, more girls have become interested. As a result, we now update the women's brackets with the same kind of information.

To enhance the geography lesson, we created a student contest for our homeroom teachers. The assignment requires students to extract information from the posted team profiles, like identifying the team that comes from the college with the largest student enrollment. Others are more complex, such as directing students to other resources to find the number of time zones a winning team must cross to get to a game site. Basketball pencils or erasers and basketball-shaped chocolates are awarded to the homeroom with the most correct entries. Prizes are also awarded to individuals.

The two of us will never agree on whether Purdue or Indiana is the better team, but we both agree this activity is a winner in attracting more teens to our library and connecting with them in an innovative way. Tournament information may be found at the NCAA Basketball Championships Web site (www.finalfour.net).