Woke up this morning remembering it’s that crazy week – the South Dakota high school basketball state tournament. Got coffee brewing and thought, man, wouldn’t it be handy to know exactly who’s playing where? So fired up the laptop around 7 AM.
First step: hunting down the teams
Started simple – checked Twitter. Found some local sports reporters tweeting about qualifiers. Copied school names onto a sticky note app on my desktop. Got messy quick with typos and duplicates. Ended up with:
- Harrisburg Tigers
- Brandon Valley Lynx
- Sioux Falls Lincoln Patriots
- O’Gorman Knights
- Pierre Governors
That was only half the bracket! Realized I needed proper sources.
The bracket nightmare
Hopped over to the state athletics site around 8:30 AM. What a dumpster fire. Took 20 minutes just to find where they hid the brackets. Finally grabbed screenshots of both Class AA boys and girls brackets. Got burned on this last year when the mobile site cropped the schedules.
Pro tip: always take full-page screenshots. Wasted 30 minutes retyping matchups cause I forgot.
Location scramble
Knew the big games are at the Sioux Falls Arena downtown. But the quarterfinals? Total mystery. Checked the schools’ athletic sites – Pierre had theirs posted but Rapid City Stevens’ site crashed when I clicked “tournament info.”
Called my buddy who coaches middle school ball. He gave me the inside scoop:
- Tuesday games at Roosevelt High gym
- Thursday semis at Washington High main court
- Championship Saturday at the arena
Dude saved me hours of headaches.
Putting it together
Dumped all info into a simple spreadsheet:
- Made columns for matchup/time/location
- Highlighted championship games in yellow
- Added notes like “parking sucks here” for downtown
Triple-checked against the state site before posting. Last year I mixed up O’Gorman’s game times and got roasted in the comments. Not repeating that!
Posted the final grid around noon. Already got three texts saying “where’d you find this? The official site’s useless!” Told ya so. Might actually print this out and tape it to my fridge for tourney week.