During the days of March 22nd to March 27th, MLA hosted our first-ever March Madness tournament, which took place during the lunch period of each grade, one for high school and another for middle school. In the words of one of the organizers of the tournaments, Cadet Captain Melissa Alfaro, “March Madness is a basketball tournament that senior cadets wanted to take part in here at MLA.”  There were a total of sixteen teams in the high school tournament and each team consisted of three players, Alfaro also noted. The idea of hosting this event came from Seniors Kaylie Carabalie and Joshua Natal, who brought this to the attention of the SMI (Senior Military Instructor), who believed it would take too long to plan and would most likely have to happen in April instead of May. In hopes of still being able to hold March Madness in the month of March, Carabalie and Natal approached our Battalion S-1, Melissa Alfaro for support. With the help of Alfaro and Master Sergeant Griffin, the event was able to take place in March as they had wanted. 

After about a week and a half of planning, the tournaments began to take place. Each team began to play with their teams and- slowly but surely- the number of teams slowly decreased until we were left with just two. One team consisted of seniors Kalie Carabalie, Joshua Natal, and Sixto Guardiola, while the other consisted of juniors Eidan Claudio, Kevin Reyes, and Joseph Alamo. According to Alfaro, both teams put up quite a fight and tried their best to make it on top, however, there had to be a winner and the winners of the tournaments, in the end, were the  junior team.

In the end, the tournaments turned out to be a complete success. Planning might have been rushed and difficult because of time, however, it all eventually fell into place once more and more students who love basketball began to join in. Once again according to Alfaro, “planning was hard at first because there weren’t many people signing up to participate, however, after the first game, more and more teams began signing up in order to  participate, and in the end, there was a pretty good turnout with the number of participants.” 

Once there was only one winning team, that team got a certificate of achievement along with a trophy and was presented with these awards during one of our battalion formations. 

Overall, the March Madness tournament turned out very well and was successful in the end, all students enjoyed it and we will most likely be seeing another one of these tournaments next school year as March rolls around again.

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March Madness tournament