John Walters

Is this the real life? Is this just fantasy?

It is a frigid Saturday evening on the campus of Ithaca College in Ithaca, New York. Inside the Whalen Center a pre-game locker room vibe permeates a classroom. The men of Casual Harmony, an all-male a cappella group from Rutgers, anxiously wait for their moment to take the stage.

Some of them stretch. Others take swigs from water bottles. Michen Sirleaf, a muscular upperclassman, detects a languor amongst his teammates.

"I want you to be sweating your asses off at the end of those 12 minutes!" Sirleaf barks, his arms flexed and glistening. "I am serious as colon cancer!"

Two members of Casual Harmony leap toward one another and chest-bump. Another checks his back pocket for his pitch pipe.

Welcome to the International Championships of Collegiate A Cappella, or ICCA. Welcome to March Madness without the Cinderella -- unless one of the groups performs a song from "Cinderella."

"It's very much like March Madness," agrees Don Gooding, founder of acappella.com and the individual who has been most instrumental -- excuse the term -- in the evolution of competitive intercollegiate a cappella. "Before it was ICCA we called it NCCA (National Championships of A Cappella). That acronym, so similar to NCAA, was purely deliberate."

The ICCAs may not have brackets, but they do have regions: Northeast, Mid-Atlantic, South, Midwest, West and even Europe. Casual Harmony is performing, that is competing, against five other groups in one of four Mid-Atlantic quarterfinals. The top two a cappella groups from each quarterfinal advance to a regional final. The six regional winners advance to the final in New York City, where a new national champion will be dubbed (but not over-dubbed) on April 19. (Casual Harmony, by the way, finished second and thus advances to the Mid-Atlantic regional final on April 5, which is being held at ... Rutgers).

Moms and dads, your college sons and daughters are making beautiful music together. And they are likely devoting more hours per week to that music than to their major.

"Most students who were in an a cappella group will tell you that they majored in a cappella," says Amanda Grish, a former vocalist with the University of Illinois group No Strings Attached. "We rehearsed five days a week, four hours at a time."

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And that's only the beginning. A cappella groups are entirely student-run and self-financed. Can you imagine Tyler Hansbrough having to raise gas money for a Tar Heels trip to the Final Four and work on his low-post pivot?

And yet 115 a cappella groups are competing in this year's ICCA in near-perfect harmony. That's only a fraction -- 10 percent, approximately -- of the number of a cappella troupes currently searching for alcoves and abbeys in which to sing on their campuses in the U.S.

In fact, there are nearly twice as many a cappella crooners on campuses as there are male and female Division I basketball players. Consider that the typical a cappella group consists of 12-15 members. That makes the number of student singers somewhere around 15,000. The quad is beginning to resemble Coke's "I'd Like to Teach The World To Sing" commercial.

Why?

"Invariably, someone will attend a concert or competition for the first time," says Anne Epstein, an alto with Nonsequitur, a coed group at Columbia. "They all tell us the same thing: You look like you're having so much fun up there."