In late March, Sidechat, a social media platform that allows college-affiliated community members to post anonymously, was flooded with posts about “March Yakness.”
While Brown did not qualify for the 2026 NCAA March Madness basketball tournament, the University did secure the Campus Cup for the most overall points in March Yakness, a nationwide online competition during which competitors play a digital cup pong game. The game is hosted by Yik Yak, which shares a parent company with Sidechat.
Brown’s e-sports game proved to be strong, and Brunonians made the Elite Eight in the game’s bracket, narrowly losing to the University of California, Santa Barbara by just 71,270 points.
Still, Brown finished March Yakness with 154,714,794 total points, a number significantly higher than runner- up University of North Dakota, which finished with 80,851,276 points.
During the tournament, students saw an invigorated school spirit.
“I think this was definitely kind of a niche thing,” Graham Israeli ’27 said. But still, he said that “the only other time I’ve really seen people have this much school spirit are Brown-Harvard games and a couple years ago when Brown almost made the real March Madness.”
Israeli joined tables of students playing together at the Blue Room, a meetup he saw advertised on Sidechat earlier.
Eli Williams ’28 was one of the students who encouraged his peers to play in the Blue Room.
The night before one of the tournament-deciding matches, Brown was down over a million points. Williams considered texting his friends or other group chats, but then thought, “What can I do in the real world?”
He decided to design a basic promotional pamphlet convincing students to play the game. He printed out around 100 copies, putting them up around campus and sliding them under the doors of students’ dorm rooms, he said.
“Around 11 a.m., one person shows up, and another person shows up, and like five other people show up,” Williams told The Herald. “By like 12:30, there were 15 to 20 people here, all grinding Yakness.”
Initially, Williams thought that there was “no way” Brown was winning. But after Brown kept progressing through multiple rounds of the tournament, Williams thought, “Maybe we’re good at this.”
Williams said he spent around four to five hours on the app one day, and some students spent “significantly more” time playing.
In The Herald’s Fall 2025 poll, when students were asked about their school spirit level for Brown sports on a scale from one to five, only around 6% of students selected five — the highest level of school spirit.
“I’m all about school spirit,” Kalen Browne ’28, who played for Brown in March Yakness, said in an interview with The Herald. “Any chance (to) put Brown on top, I’m down.”
Browne said that because Brown students seem to use Sidechat “pretty regularly,” the school was able to win “pretty easily” at first. According to The Herald’s Fall 2024 Poll, three in five undergraduates at Brown use Sidechat, with 15% of students scrolling the app daily.
“I think it became really serious once we realized we were the only Ivy League school left,” Browne said. “We’re representing the whole community.”
But once Brown was out of the tournament, busy Brunonians had to return to their regularly scheduled lives — trading online cup pong for academics.
“I’m an engineer, and I don’t have time for the chicanery all week,” Williams said.
Nate Barkow is a senior staff writer for the Youth and Education beat and a co-chief of The Herald's social media team. He is from New York City and plans on concentrating in International and Public Affairs and Education Studies. In his free time, he loves trying new restaurants and watching Survivor.
