There’s not too much shame in a botched March Madness bracket. The NCAA Tournament is compressed chaos in single elimination, upsets are part of the game, and only one entrant can actually win it all.

What we can’t forgive is a lazy, uninspired bracket name.

The men’s and women’s tournaments give us a wealth of punnable school, player and coach names to choose from — even an arena or two. Here are this correspondent’s favorite puns and frivolities for 2025 bracket names. Give us yours in the comments below.

Men’s

Ok, Broomer — For those who see Auburn as an inevitability, go with their star, Johni Broome. These are not your postwar Tigers.

Green Flaggs — A lot of folks will swipe right on the Blue Devils if their megastar Cooper Flagg is healthy.

Lipsey’s Hustle — The marathon continues for Tamin Lipsey, Iowa State and the Fightin’ Otzelbergers.

Knuck If You Buzz — Texas A&M head coach Buzz Williams has the sheer intensity and righteous passion of prime Lil Scrappy.

Let’s Get Oweh From It All — To Kentucky’s Otega Oweh: “Let’s take a boat to Bermuda, let’s take a plane to Lexington.”

Yes, UConn — For the Huskies believers.

No, UConn’t — For people who actually watched UConn this season.

Creighton for a Star to Fall — The name whispered on the wind was, in fact, “Ryan Kalkbrenner.”

Caleb Love and Basketball — For what? Our hearts, of course. And an Arizona run.

Caleb Grillz — Missouri bucket-getter Caleb Grill has his whole top diamond and the bottom row gold … we think.

Littlejohn and the Eastside Boyz — Chase Hunter and Clemson have forced their tourney seeding to Get Low. Looking to bring some hardware back to Littlejohn Coliseum.

Frankie Fidler on the Roof — To life, to life, to Sparty. Tevye would’ve trusted Michigan State’s Tom Izzo in March.

Love (Ma)shack — It’s a lil’ old place where we can get together … and make Alabama really upset. Tennessee’s Jahmai Mashack had one of the coolest moments of this college season.

LJ Cryer and the Infinite Sadness — A [Houston] Cougar with Butterfly Wings. Underestimate whatever that is at your own peril.

Queen’s Gambit — Maryland’s freshman center Derik Queen is the tallest, fleetest turtle we’ve ever seen.

Kameron Presents…the (Golden) Diplomats — Based on Marquette’s guard Kameron Jones. Does that make David Joplin Juelz Santana?

Silkk Da Shaka — Another great Marquette play.

Toppin My Collar — For those both appreciating Texas Tech’s resurgence (and star JT Toppin) and wishing it was 2005 again.

“What Are You Doing in My Swamp?!”— The Florida Gators would win and cover against Lord Farquaad.

Rick Pitino’s Bodega Corner — The Johnnies have taken New York by (red) storm.

Throw it Down, Big Man —For those wanting to honor the late Bill Walton.

One Shining Moment — For those wanting to honor the late Greg Gumbel.

Grant Nelson’s Mustache —  In celebration of the sport’s modern canon.

The Parentheses Preferers — Who needs brackets? Proper punctuation prevents poor performance.

Tar Heels and Glass Slippers — Maybe, just maybe, there’s someone out there who has UNC making a Cinderella turn.

The Floor Slappers Federation — Yup, it’s about that time.

Women’s

Elementary, My Dear Watkins — For those who fashion JuJu Watkins and the Trojans as “A Study in Scarlet.”

JuJu Fruit — We’re sweet on JuJu and USC.

For Bueckers or Worse — Paige Bueckers is the superstar, but Sarah Strong and Azzi Fudd also balled out this year.

For Auriemma, Forever Ago — Do we think UConn’s iconic coach, Geno Auriemma, knows who or what Bon Iver is?

Place Your Betts — UCLA and Lauren Betts could certainly cash out after their inspired Big Ten tourney performance.

Dawn and On — South Carolina and Dawn Staley pursue their fourth national title of this era. We’ll take every opportunity to hear more Erykah Badu.

Boom Boom Paopao — The WNBA-bound Gamecock Te-Hina Paopao is so 3008.

The Van, The Lith, The Legend — TCU’s superstar Hailey Van Lith just put in work as the MVP of the Big 12 Tournament.

Hidalgo To Bed — Don’t sleep on Notre Dame (or Hannah Hidalgo) despite the late-season slump.

Came Out a Beast — Flau’jae Johnson is nice on the boards and in the booth.

Taylor Jones’ Block Party — Everyone’s invited. Texas is tough in the frontcourt.

Wes is Moore — A guiding mantra. NC State’s sideline strategist Wes Moore is the ACC’s Coach of the Year.

Lawson’s Creek — For those switching over to Duke (coached by Kara Lawson) after their conference tournament title. Casting recommendation: Michelle Williams as Toby Fournier.

O.K., Sooner — We brought it back one time for those rolling with Raegan Beers and Oklahoma.

(Illustration: Kelsea Petersen / The Athletic; Harry How / Getty Images, Grant Halverson / Getty Images, Kevin C. Cox / Getty Images)

INDIAN WELLS, Calif. — Conchita Martinez, one of the queen bees of tennis, had done just about everything there was to do in the sport.

She had won Wimbledon. She had coached Garbine Muguruza to win Wimbledon. She had won five Federation Cup titles as part of Spain’s women’s national team, going on to captain the team and then to run the entire tournament, by which time it was known as the Billie Jean King Cup. She found time to captain the men’s national team in the Davis Cup, too.

But last spring, a new type of opportunity arrived: molding a teenager with the chance to be a generational talent. Did she want to coach Mirra Andreeva, the Russian already making waves on the WTA Tour at 16?

Muguruza was in her early twenties when Martinez helped guide her to the Wimbledon title in 2017. There’s only so much a coach can do at that point. Coaching a teenager is a chance to help define their tennis for the better, perhaps forever. It’s also coaching a teenager … yikes!

Not really. A year later, Andreeva, 17, is the toast of tennis. She is the ascendant player on the WTA Tour, on a 10-match winning streak that brought her a debut WTA 1,000 title in Dubai, UAE, and took her into the top 10 of the rankings for the first time. Coco Gauff did not win one of those titles, one rung below a Grand Slam, until she was 19.

She has beaten all comers in that streak: Iga Swiatek, the world No. 2 and the dominant player in the sport the past three years, was demolished in Dubai. Andreeva beat Elena Rybakina there too, and when she played the 2022 Wimbledon champion again at Indian Wells on Tuesday night, it wasn’t even competitive. Andreeva produced a 6-1, 6-2 masterclass.

Thursday afternoon brought tighter competition against Elina Svitolina, a former world No. 2, but the same result: 7-5, 6-3 to the young Russian. Andreeva didn’t just win. She confused and beguiled an opponent 13 years her senior, moving Svitolina around the court, interspersing drop shots with power and angles in a way that teenagers rarely do. They are supposed to be one- or two-dimensional in their first years, and then develop an arsenal.

And then came Friday, a rematch with an extra-motivated Swiatek, still smarting from the loss last month in Dubai and trying to win a tournament for the first time since the French Open last year. She blasted her way into their semifinal with her usual brutal efficiency. Surely this was too tall a task for Andreeva, especially as she kept slipping behind in her service games, setting up moment after moment when Swiatek’s opponents so often crumble.

Andreeva did the opposite of that, in a flurry of those flat, cross-court and down-the-line backhands that Swiatek couldn’t touch. Or she hung in rallies until Swiatek’s impatience got the better of her and the former world No. 1 sent forehands wide and backhands into the net. Swiatek had inroads in nearly all of Andreeva’s service games, but she rarely took them to break points. Soon, she was swatting balls in anger and snapping at her coaches. Andreeva, cool and collected and courageous when it counted most, was marching into the final, having won fewer points and been under more pressure.

“I don’t know why I felt so much confidence,’ Andreeva said in her post-match news conference.

That may have something to do with the 52-year-old Spanish woman sitting in Andreeva’s box, often with a resting grin-face as she watches her latest charge. Andreeva said Wednesday that she was always smaller than her competition growing up — at 5ft 9in (175cm), she isn’t anymore — and that forced her to find ways to win without overwhelming power. She learned to use her legs, to counterpunch and to spin the ball in all directions. Those attributes propelled her during her breakout tournaments, the 2023 Madrid Open and the 2024 Australian Open, where she put top players to the sword and puzzled lost positions into winning ones.

Martinez, Andreeva said, has taken those skills to a different, more aggressive level. Now she uses her tricks on offense as well as defense.

“Conchita is helping me to not be defensive all the time, when I have a chance to step in and try to be aggressive and to go for my shots,” she said in her news conference after beating Svitolina. “It’s working pretty good.”

It is. In 2025, Andreeva is winning a lower proportion of return points than she did in 2024, according to data collated by Tennis Abstract. She’s making fewer of her first serves. But she is winning a higher proportion of points behind those serves — 69 percent vs. 64 — and her dominance ratio, which divides the percentage of return points won by the percentage of serve points lost, has increased from 1.14 to 1.22 despite her drop-off on return. She is dictating more than she is being dictated to.

Beyond the results, Martinez has evolved into an Obi-Wan Kenobi to Andreeva’s Luke Skywalker, but only sort of. Skywalker never really tried to prank Kenobi as Andreeva often does Martinez, including Wednesday afternoon, when her coach was attempting to have a quasi-serious conversation with a journalist.

Cue the goofy faces and poses about 15 feet behind said journalist, attempting to mess with Martinez’s game face. Mission accomplished. Then off went a giggling Andreeva, simultaneously embarrassed and thrilled to have one of the legends of the sport kvelling about her.

Oh, to be 17 and have it all happening for you, in ways that sometimes even Andreeva does not understand.

“I don’t know why people are supporting me this much because honestly, when I was playing in U.S., my results were not great,” she said in her post-match news conference after easing past Rybakina. Andreeva lost in the first round in her only previous appearance here last year and lost in the second round in her two U.S. Open appearances.

“People are so energetic,” she said. “It kind of lights me up.”

Once that happens, watch out. Here comes a drop shot on an angle, followed by a whistling topspin lob. Or another searing, flat backhand diving onto the knot of the singles sideline and shooting off the court. Or, and perhaps most often, there’s her forehand squash-shot slice, which converts a position of stress into one of control.

In Andreeva, Martinez has found a near perfect muse, a player who aspires to play with the creativity that Martinez had, with her own style of quiet determination and passion. Andreeva barely had a slice a year ago. Now, she can use it for defensive or offensive shots. Martinez wants her to develop a heavier forehand with more spin to make it more difficult for an opponent to get the ball back. She’s working with her to play around with different trajectories, “instead of just hitting flat from nowhere.”

She wants her to have choices and is trying to teach her how to make the good ones.

“She’s not making a lot of stupid decisions on the court,” Martinez said. “It’s about having the good choices, waiting for the right ball, to compete against any player.”

Coach-player relationships can be overrated in tennis, a sport where there are few chances for a real tactical discussion and no timeouts. Plenty of players run through coaches like toilet paper, jettisoning them at the first patch of poor results.

There are some relationships, though, that evolve into so much more than discussions about forehands and backhands, serves and returns. Carlos Alcaraz has one of those with Juan Carlos Ferrero, Martinez’s compatriot and a former world No. 1. Ferrero has guided Alcaraz for seven years, since he was 14.

Andreeva and Martinez have some way to go to catch up with them, but they are off to a good start. They are living similar versions of the same life in different eras. Martinez was just 16 when she made the fourth round of the French Open, in her third professional tournament. The next year, she reached the quarterfinals at Roland Garros and finished the year as the world No. 7. She and her compatriot, Arantxa Sanchez Vicario, captured the imagination of the sport, a creative and passionate yin to the brutalist, machine-like yang of Steffi Graf.

Martinez knows what it’s like to be on the verge of the world discovering you, and then to make that leap from tennis being an exercise in what is fresh and fearless to a world of expectation. First, they ask, “How did you do that?” Then it becomes: “Why didn’t you do that?”

“Tennis forces you to grow up quickly but she maintains that playfulness in there, she likes to joke around,” she said. “I am very much like that too. I like to joke around. I like to bother her. She likes to bother me.”

Andreeva is a student of the game’s history. She passes evenings in bed watching old tennis matches on YouTube. She knew all about Conchita Martinez. During her first months on the tour, though, she didn’t realize that Martinez was the woman who kept smiling and nodding to her at various tournaments.

When she finally did, she couldn’t believe that Martinez knew who she was, or that she would take the time to be cordial to her. Then, after she split with her coach and Muguruza retired, Andreeva’s management team floated Martinez as a potential match.

Andreeva knew the resume. Wimbledon champion, coach of a Wimbledon champion. Good enough for her.

They had several talks to feel each other out, which was more Martinez taking the measure of this teenage girl born in Siberia, raised in Sochi, Russia, and who moved to the south of France to traipse the tennis world. She needed to make sure that Andreeva was ready to be serious, that she was hiring a coach and not a babysitter.

She quickly realized that Andreeva is mature beyond her years. She eats right, she rests, she listens to adults older and smarter than she is. She could look someone in the eye and have a serious conversation in three languages, soon to be a fourth as she picks up Spanish.

“She’s a sponge,” Martinez said.

Conchita Martinez has accelerated Andreeva’s rise to the top of tennis. (Robert Prange / Getty Images)

They tried a tournament together and Andreeva said she immediately felt comfortable with Martinez. “Super great,” is how she described their chemistry.

“She told me that it was the same for her, so thank God it’s not just me,” she said the other day in a news conference, with her trademark grin and twinkle in her eyes. “I completely trust her with everything. I think she knows everything that’s going on in my life. I don’t know if it’s good or bad, but, no, it’s just like this.”

When they first started, Martinez worried that Andreeva might not be enough of a teenager, rather than too much of one. On the practice courts in France or in Barcelona, where Martinez lives, Andreeva would hit 10 great shots in a row, miss on the 11th and drama would ensue.

Martinez told her to give herself a break, maybe focus on the 10 good ones instead of the last miss. And when she hit a great shot, she needed to learn to acknowledge it, to enjoy it and be proud of what she has accomplished.

“I always tell her, ‘Wow, amazing’,” she said. “You need to have fun with those things. Amazing drop shots, amazing angle. Wow, great, don’t take it for granted. Enjoy that.”

There has been plenty to enjoy lately. Andreeva’s ranking was hovering around 40 when Martinez came on the scene. She finished last year making the final of the Ningbo Open in China, where she lost against Daria Kasatkina from a winning position and broke down in tears at the trophy ceremony. Then she made the fourth round of the Australian Open, went 1-1 in Qatar and 6-0 in Dubai. Until very recently, she was the only teenager in the WTA top 100.

While the tennis world had long expected Andreeva’s ascendancy, the steepness and immediacy of this year’s trajectory has been a surprise. Not for Martinez. She couldn’t make much of an impact last year, because she started with Andreeva in the middle of the season, but the off-season let the Russian get the full Martinez treatment. They combined fitness and weight training with their goals to achieve a certain style of play.

Now comes the task of maintaining the work ethic that has lifted Andreeva to her lofty heights so quickly. People think getting to the top 10 is the hard part. It isn’t, Martinez said.

“It’s not getting there, it’s staying there — year after year, dealing with the pressure of defending those points and staying in a good frame of mind. And doing it all over and all over again,“ Martinez said.

She has shown few signs of doing anything else. Even after she got steamrollered in the second set against Swiatek, she told herself to run and fight for every point, to not worry how she got balls back but to get them back, however she could. When it was over, and Andreeva was 7-6(1), 1-6, 6-3 winner, Andreeva gave a nod to Martinez, a two-time finalist at Indian Wells, and a little ribbing, too.

“My coach lost in the finals,”  she said. “I’m going to try to do better than her.”

Nothing would please Martinez more.

(Top photo: Jay Calderon / The Desert Sun via Imagn Images)