🤦🏼‍♂️ It's Pronounced Am-Ah-Saw, You Idiot

📍Blink and You’ll Miss It

Google Amasa, Michigan and you’ll find yourself in the middle of nowhere.

Well, to be fair they do have the Rusty Sawblade which appears to have a loaded mac and cheese dish topped with bacon and… raw onions?

But in all seriousness, this town of 300 people is the first line in the NCAA’s $1 billion March Madness Machine. Let me explain:

Connor Sports has been the company responsible for cutting, finishing, painting, and shipping every men’s and women’s March Madness court since 2006.

And in 2016, this workload increased to creating 12 custom courts for each round of the tournament.

A short aside, I love when sporting events go with a unique, city-specific logo. So naturally, I think what the NFL has done to the Super Bowl in the last decade should be considered criminal:

But the mill town of Amasa still gets each court done by March (they just need a bit of a headstart):

🌳 October: First-grade northern hard maple trees from Michigan’s Upper Peninsula are cut and built into pallet-sized pieces.

🖌 January: Eight guys start putting the finish on the wood, and then another four do the custom paint jobs over the course of about 2 months.

🚛 March: The cut, finished and painted pieces are shipped across the country to each arena.

🧩 Here they’re assembled like puzzle pieces by teams of ten over the course of four hours.

🪵 That’s A Lot of Wood

Just the Final Four court alone is comprised of 381 panels, weighing 160 pounds each.

That’s:

56,000 pounds of wood per court

x 12 courts for the Men’s and Women’s tournaments

= 672,000 pounds of wood that are cut, painted, and assembled

💰 One Man’s Court is Another Man’s… Court

Once March Madness is done, these courts will be disassembled for one of several outcomes:

• Option 1a: The winning team buys the court to use in their own gym

  • Option 1b: The winning team buys the court to use as decoration

  • Option 1c: The winning team buys the court to sell it to their fans

• Option 2: The court is sold to a cash-strapped athletic department for ~$90,000 (a savings of ~$15,000 for a normal court of this quality)

🔮 Mirror Mirror on the Wall

Not that anyone asked, but I got UConn over FAU in the national championship.

And some free advice: take a future on FAU to win it all, they’re currently sitting with the worst odds at +550 and have the second-highest combined rating for offense and defense according to Kenpom.

That means if they win it all, you win $550 on a $100 bet.

📵 Will TikTok Get Banned?

No.

👋 Happy Final Four Weekend!