Cashing in
Former Butler High School and Butler County Community College basketball player Jace Stutz and 13-year-old seventh-grader Aden Livermore tied for the top spot in the Butler Eagle’s annual March Madness contest.
Stutz picked up the $500 first prize in a tiebreaker, coming closer in predicting points scored in the NCAA Championship Game.
Aden, a Butler resident, doesn’t mind the second-place money of $250. He picked up another $700 in a squares pool the night Kansas defeated North Carolina for te championship.
“The whole thing worked out for me,” Aden said. “I did better than everybody else in my family (in the March Madness Contest).
“I finished 100th in the contest before. That was the best any of us had ever done before this year.”
Aden’s sister, brother and father all play the Eagle’s March Madness Contest every year.
Aden correctly picked Kansas to win it all. So did Stutz and third-place finisher Allen Wright Jr. of Saxonburg. Wright had three of the Final Four correct — picking Kansas, Duke and North Carolina — while missing on Michigan. He finished the contest with 81 points. Stutz and Aden Livermore had 83.
“I’ve been playing that contest since about 2005,” Stutz said. “I’d never come closer to winning before. I usually pick the teams I want to win, not the teams I think will win. That hasn’t exactly worked out for me.”
Basketball certainly did. Stutz was a starter on winning teams at Butler and set the BC3 record for most charges taken.
But when Kentucky — one of his Final Four choices — lost to Saint Peter’s in the first round, “I figured I was done.”
His other Final Four selections were Duke and Illinois. Aden had Duke, Kansas and Villanova pegged for the Final Four, but also picked Kentucky to get there.
When the Wildcats bowed out early, “my bracket was busted,” Aden said.
Or so it seemed.
Stutz has applied to become a state police officer. He does not have plans for the $500 yet, but said the money will make a recent trip to Philadelphia come close to breaking even.
Stutz, his brother Joel, former Butler teammate Ian McCarrier and others recently traveled across the state to watch fellow Golden Tornado graduate Ethan Morton and Purdue play Saint Peter’s in the Sweet 16.
“I was so upset when they (Purdue) lost that I couldn’t get into that UCLA-North Carolina game (that followed),” Stutz admitted. “As it turned out, that North Carolina win probably helped me.
“We sold our tickets to the next round to some Saint Peter’s fans, so we got some of our money back that way. Then I rooted for North Carolina to upset Duke because I figured that would knock out a few more people (in the contest).”
Stutz’s older brother, Jake, finished second in the Eagle’s contest years ago, “but he was a little kid then and my dad filled out his bracket,” Jace said, laughing.
“It’s funny how this stuff works out. When Kentucky lost, I didn’t think I had a chance. Then I saw the standings in the paper later on and thought, ‘maybe I’ve got something going here.’”
When Kansas won, it turned out that he did.
