February can be a dark and stormy month, but March brings relief with sunshine, spring break, and the NCAA March Madness basketball tournament. To generate interest in this year’s March Madness, Maria Center residents Roger Simmons, Ken Jamsa, and I decided to create a March Madness contest with prize money, and with no charge to contestants who entered. We agreed to donate a grand total of $24 in prize money to those contestants whose names aligned with winning basketball teams.
Next, we needed to figure out how to do this. We needed to match The Center at Donaldson contestants with each of the 128 teams in the combined men’s and women’s tournaments. We had to persuade TCAD Sisters, coworkers, and residents to sign-up for the contest. We also had to figure out how to make the contest fair and fun.
Since the project was becoming complicated, we (the men) decided to include women in the planning. After doing the heavy lifting of dreaming up a contest, the trio turned the actual work of figuring out how to implement it to women volunteers. Led by Loretta Kania, these ladies (Loretta, Pauline Pierson, Doris Fieser, and Dorothy Geisler) figured out the precise number of contestants required to make the contest work (32), how to recruit that exact number (Loretta’s strong arming), and how to match contestants with teams (let Loretta handle it). One evening the women got together and assigned two teams from each tournament, men’s and women’s to the 32 players. Ken was on hand to supervise if needed, but he wasn’t. Whew, the women made it all work without any glitches or male input. How? Beats me.
We expected an enthusiastic response because basketball is such an important activity in Indiana. Some people know the state tree is the Tulip, the state flower is the Peony, and the state snack is popcorn (all true), and many sports fans think the state athletic activity should be basketball. In any case, excitement ran high this year because five Indiana teams would be competing—IU men and women, Purdue men and women, and Notre Dame women. Purdue men and women both lost their first games. However, top seed Purdue men made basketball infamy by losing its first and only game to lightly regarded Fairleigh Dickinson, a university so disconnected that part of its campus is in England. IU men and women, both seeded number one in their brackets (“brackets”? ask Loretta), did not do much better, losing unexpectedly in just their second game. Notre Dame women won two games before losing their third game. Indiana’s hope for March madness glory was gone with the wind.
Yet eight TCAD folks were still in the game as the tournament entered the quarterfinals. Three coworkers--Glenna Yurgilas (Miami men), Garrett Wright (UConn women), and Larry McLean (Florida Atlantic men); three residents (Mary Alice Ziesenhene (UConn men), Doris Fieser (Miami women), Loretta Kania (LSU women); and two sisters (Sister Kathleen Kelly (South Carolina women), and Sister Therese (Iowa women) each won a silver dollar. The four all-women winners of the semifinal games, Doris, Mary Alice, Sister Therese, and Loretta, received an additional paper dollar. When their teams won national championships, Mary Alice (UConn men) and Loretta (LSU women) received one brand new uncirculated two-dollar bill with Loretta’s picture on it (just kidding, it’s Thomas Jefferson’s). God and Loretta willing, we will do this again next year.
