Round 3 Recap, Round 4 Underway + Ends Today!
Key stats and highlights from Round 3
It’s time for another ultra-abbreviated Madness! Poetry round recap and next round preview. Only for “More” subscribers (that’s you!).
Round 3 featured another 8 excellent matches that ruthlessly reduced our pool of remaining authletes by half yet again, from 16 to now 8. Voting held fairly steady in Round 3 vs. Round 2, but we’re still hoping for a lot more student votes than we’ve managed so far this year. I’ve unfortunately not been able to promote the event as much as I’d like this week or last, which has been a contributing factor. So once again, please share news of the event with the educators in your life so we can spark more students’ interest in and excitement about poetry! There’s still an opportunity for group leaders to vote with their students in the remaining rounds!
With that said, let’s move on to the recap …
Round 3 Recap:
Key stats:
Total votes cast: 1,704 🗳
Total comments made: 224 📣
Wackiest word prompt: Fairly tame round, but we’ll go with “fashionista” 🤯
Closest match: The battle of “encased” 🏁
45.3% Hannah Roy LaGrone vs.
54.7% Jean O’Connor
Unfortunately, Hannah finds herself on the losing end of the “closest match” battle this time after winning last round’s closest match. But sometimes that’s just the way it goes!
Biggest margin of victory: Kelly Conroy once again captured the highest % of votes in any match (74.3%) with her fun poem “My Backpack’s Too Heavy” 🚀
Biggest upsets: It’s hard to call anything an upset at this point in the event, but Terri Cohlene (11 seed) and the above-mentioned Jean O’Connor (12) continue their impressive runs by eliminating their higher-seeded opponents to advance to the quarterfinals. By the (admittedly very subjective and often quickly outdated) numbers, we’d “expect” mostly 1’s and 2’s to be the last authletes standing, but at the end of the day the only thing that matters is writing great poems, and Terri, Jean, and all of our “Elite Eight” authletes continue to do just that!
Round 4 Preview:
I’m sounding like a broken record now, as once again this is not much of a “preview” since the round is already well underway and ends later today BUT it’s an exciting round nonetheless!
The now-very-short Round 4 word list consists of these four linguistic beauties:
spongy
vagabond
wizened
zephyr
What would YOU do with one of these words?
Round 4 voting ends Tuesday 5/9 at 7pm EDT. If YOU haven’t voted yet, visit the match list (the matches at the top are in most need of votes) right now to read and vote for your favorite poems in each match! 🗳 x 4 = ❤️
See you next round …