NCAA Tournament Party

I had to share this really cute idea with you! I work at a church office and this year we had a bracket challenge for the Men's NCAA Basketball Tournament. It was so fun and the winner was promised a fun prize! I wanted to have an awards ceremony after the tournament ended, but I couldn't figure out what prize I was going to give out. I thought about it for weeks and couldn't come up with anything creative at all. There were 10 people who participated in the challenge and before the final game, all of our brackets were busted but there were four ties among our group of participants. It all came down to the final score of the championship game. The winner got a bucket of popcorn (which was perfect for him since he eats popcorn in the office all the time), the person with the worst score got a Zero bar (thanks to a suggestion from a sweet friend), and we drew two names and gave away Nerf basketball hoops to the winners of the drawing. It was so fun!!

My favorite part of the "ceremony" was the treat portion of the afternoon. My mom had a fabulous idea to make red velvet cupcakes and color the batter according to the favorite teams of each participant. Here is the end result of our efforts:


Blue Velvet for UK:



Red Velvet for U of L:




A combo cupcake for Belmont:



There was also one unfortunate UNC fan in the crowd, but the North Carolina blue proved to be very hard to get. It ended up being green. I had to apologize in advance for that disaster. I don't think it phased him too much, though. He ate both of his cupcakes with no problem!

We topped the cupcakes off with homemade cream cheese icing and basketball themed toppings. I printed each person's team logo out on cardstock and taped it to a lollipop stick for one of the cupcakes and stuck a basketball-shaped Easter egg on top of the other one.

Here is one final picture of all the cupcakes:


As you can tell, the UK fans outnumbered everyone else (and all is right with the world). :)

We are planning to make this bracket challenge an annual event. Do you have an ideas for prizes? It may take me all year to come up with something!