Ryno’s March Madness was founded in 2001. It was the winter time, and the Baltimore Ravens had just won Super Bowl XXXV over the NY Giants. People were jamming Shaggy’s, “It wasn’t me” on their radios. And I say radios, as the first iPod was still seven months away from being released. Nobody knew what texting was yet. To them, their Nokia 3310 phones were just used to talk. But enough reminiscing…
March Madness is that great time of year, where the sporting world starts to get going again. After the thrill of the Super Bowl wears off, the winter doldrums of February loom on where the baseball season hasn’t started yet. Hockey and basketball teams are killing time until their ridiculously long playoff seasons begin.
So like many offices, Ryno wanted to have his own March Madness pool. Like most, the only way people played was to fill out their bracket sheets and hand them in, or even fax them. Manually scoring every sheet, every round was a daunting task. You were lucky to know where you stood before the tournament was over.
Ryno and his coworkers, Tony Z. and Charlie K., knew there had to be a better way. If only they could somehow harness the power of Windows 98, and use that to help make the office pool easier to get people to play and give them updated scores. And so it began…Ryno found a program that would do all scoring of the tournament. You simply had to have people download the software program on their computers, make their picks, save that file, fire up their AOL dial-up connection, and send it back. Well, people weren’t the most tech savvy back then, so most people still ended up manually filling out their picks and handing them in. But we had this nice software program that would do all the work, we just had to get the picks entered.
Then the web started becoming more and more popular. Broadband was growing in popularity, and Ryno’s March Madness went to a fully managed tournament via the web. Instant updates, people following their progress by the game!!!
Today, Ryno’s March Madness has grown to over 1,100 entries per year! It’s people like you that have consistently played and helped spread the word. And to that Ryno says, “Thanks!”
Keep on playing and spreading the word!
-Ryno