Okay so today I wanted to tackle that Battle 4 Atlantis basketball tournament craziness. Scores flying everywhere, teams I barely know playing back-to-back. Last year? Total nightmare trying to remember who beat who and what it meant for the next game. So I decided, enough is enough. Need a simple way to follow the bracket myself.
The Starting Point
My first thought? Pen and paper. Seriously, I grabbed a printed bracket I found online. Sounds easy, right? Wrong. I scribbled down the first game score… then my kid needed help with homework. Came back, totally forgot who played who next. And finding a specific game result? Forget it. That bracket became a crumpled mess halfway through Day 1. Total disaster.
Figured I needed something digital. I opened up that free spreadsheet thingy everyone uses. You know the one. Started making one column for “Winner”, another for “Score”. Seemed straightforward. But then I realized the bracket isn’t just lines! It’s winners playing winners, losers playing losers. My spreadsheet was just a flat list, not showing who advanced where. Lost the plot immediately.
Making It Work (Sorta)
Alright, time to level up. I realized I needed to actually map out the bracket shape. So I resized cells like crazy, merged some, drew border lines – basically tried making a visual bracket inside the spreadsheet. Looked messy, but okay, progress. Now my columns were:
Game
Team 1
Team 2
Winner
Score
I started filling in blanks as the first games happened. Miami vs Dayton? Easy, slotted that in. But then USC vs BYU happened… and I realized I had no clue where the winner played next! My bracket visual kinda sucked. I had to constantly scroll up and down, squinting at my janky lines connecting cells. Annoying as heck.
The Minor Breakthroughs
Got desperate. Started color-coding:
Green for teams moving on. Red for losers (poor guys). This actually helped! At a glance, I could see who was still dancing. Minor win.
Then I learned about that “=if” function. Set it so that if I typed “Win” under the winner column, it would autofill that team name into the next game spot for the winner’s bracket. Sounds smart, but I messed it up constantly. Took like three tries referencing cells correctly. Felt dumb, but hey, it started working!
The absolute MVP moment? Discovering “Conditional Formatting”. I made the winner cell auto-turn green and the loser cell auto-turn red based on, well, who won. Sounds simple, but when it actually worked after the next game? Felt like magic. Less manual coloring for me!
The Current State
So yeah, my “Track Every Game Result Easily” project? It ain’t perfect. My spreadsheet still looks kinda Frankenstein-ed together, and I accidentally erased that formula once forcing me to redo it. But honestly? It works for me.
This year I watched the games and punched in scores faster. I knew exactly where Tennessee popped up next after their big win. No more frantic Google searches mid-game asking “Who do they play now?!” No more lost papers. It fits my brain, even if it’s held together with virtual duct tape.
The big takeaway? Sometimes you just gotta start dumb. Pen and paper failed? Fine, try a spreadsheet. That sucked too? Keep tweaking. Colors, simple formulas – those made the difference for my simple brain trying to follow a chaotic tournament. It definitely made Battle 4 Atlantis way less confusing. Still messy behind the scenes though, no lie!
