March Madness 2017 Bracket!

IT'S HERE!

The poll results are in, and we're ready to start voting next Wednesday, March 1.

In order, our seeds are:

The Pie, from National Velvet

Beauty, from Black Beauty

The Black, from Walter Farley's Black Stallion

Hidalgo, from the movie of the same name

Sleipnir, from Norse mythology

Ashleigh's Wonder, from the Thoroughbred series

Merrylegs, from Black Beauty

Artax, from The Neverending Story

Flicka, from My Friend Flicka

Brego, from Lord of the Rings

Flame, from Walter Farley's Black Stallion

Smoky the Cowhorse, from the Smoky the Cowhorse book series

Joey, from War Horse

Angus, from Brave (Disney movie)

Pegasus

The Colt from Old Regret, from The Man from Snowy River

SO, what are our next steps?

You can participate in this tournament in one of two ways.

1. Just follow along and vote and root for your favorite horse. All that means is you check back here regularly and keep voting!

2. Create your own bracket for a little skin in the game. Originally, I thought that the winner might get the cash pool but it turns out that's kind of illegal and also not easy to manage - it would mean you would all have to give me the money and I'd have to keep it and there were no easy online tools to do that.

So here's plan b: you donate an entry fee to a GoFundMe account. At the end of the tournament, all of that money is donated to the winner's equine-related charity of choice AND the winner gets a bunch of awesome prizes. Now, I don't know what those are yet, so consider this my recruitment post: do you have something you want to offer as a prize for our contest? If you donate something, then I will waive your entry donation for the tournament.

Our first prize is one that I will put up: a custom quarter sheet, made to the colors/pattern of your choice and your horse's measurements! I'll do a roundup post soon when I've collected more prizes.

If you want to create your own bracket, here are your steps.

a. Donate a sum of money (minimum $5) to our Equine Charity GoFundMe account.

b. Save the bracket image above and make your predictions; use MS paint or something else to fill in who you think will win each match, and ultimately the whole tournament

If you want to enter everything from scratch and use an easier tool, here's a bracket PDF; you can use a screenshot to save it as an image.

c. Email your completed bracket to beljoeor@gmail.com. I will then post it on our tournament page for everyone else to see that you've officially entered, and link back to your blog. I'll also double-check at that time to make sure that you've made a donation to officially enter.