Seeking a little March madness? Pick the winner of best prep photosFree

That got me thinking. What are missing most right now in the sports world?

On the national stage, it’s March Madness, the NCAA basketball tournaments, busting brackets.

Right now, we should be through the first two rounds of the NCAAs, which would normally leave us elated over that 12/5 upset we picked, or anguishing that one of our Final Four teams is out.

Locally, a lot of folks are missing high school sports. The wonderful weather last week probably made athletes and coaches miss the fact that they weren’t out competing last week.

So, what if we put those two things together to provide us a little distraction?

CAST YOUR VOTES HERE

I have selected 64 of the best photos The Columbian has shot during the 2019-20 high school sports year and arranged them in a 64-entry bracket.

We invite the reader to vote on the photo they like more, and we’ll advance the winners until 64 have been reduced to one.

I’ve divided the images into four categories or brackets – football, basketball, all other sports and wild card, the last of which is a mixture of the images from the first three categories.

Now, we hope that when people vote, they will base their vote on the merit of the image itself and not specifically on the moment, team or athlete that is portrayed.

It’s the best photo, not the best moment.

CAST YOUR VOTES HERE

One other thing – the platform that we are using for this feature is a little different than other votes we’ve held, like athlete of the week or All-Region voting.

When you go to vote, you’ll be asked to enter an email address. This is how we will monitor vote manipulation. We allow one vote, per round, per email address.

Our other voting tools allow one vote per IP address, which basically limits to one vote per household, or by cookies, which can be cleared from browsers.

With email address, everyone in a household can participate.

After putting in your email, a second page will ask for some information like your zip code or age group that will provide us with some demographic information to get a better idea of our audience.

In an effort to make this as unintrusive as possible, I’ve limited the number of demographic questions. We hope it won’t keep your from participating.

Once you’ve completed the demographic questions once, you won’t be asked to do it again if you want to vote in later rounds or in any other vote The Columbian uses on this platform.

We’ll keep voting open for the first round of matchups through Friday. Then we’ll take a day to reset the matchups for the next round before starting the voting on the round of 32 on Saturday.

This process will continue through the sweet 16, elite 8, final four and finally the final matchup, each allowing for five days of voting.

CAST YOUR VOTES HERE

By doing this, we can provide a month’s worth of distraction, even if it’s just a small one.

And by the time we crown a winner, hopefully things will be a little bit closer to normal.

Tim Martinez is the assistant sports editor/prep coordinator for The Columbian. He can be reached at (360) 735-4538, tim.martinez@columbian.com or follow his Twitter handle @360TMart.