Honestly, tracking down all the team rosters for this Spokane tournament turned into way more work than I thought it would. Figured it’d be simple, you know? Just look up the schools. Yeah, right.
Starting Point Was a Mess
First things first, I grabbed the official list of competing schools from the tournament website. Looked easy enough – about 25 high school teams from all over the region. My bright idea? Hop online, find each school’s athletics page, and boom – rosters downloaded. Easy peasy.
Oh boy, was I wrong. Jumped onto Gonzaga Prep’s site first. Basketball section? Found it. Rosters? Blank. Seriously. Just a note saying “Check back later.” Later when? The tournament was next week!
Scavenger Hunt Mode
So then it was time to get scrappy. I started digging deeper:
- Search Engine Tricks: Typed stuff like “Lewis and Clark High School 2025 Boys Basketball Roster” hoping maybe a local news site had it.
- Social Media Stalking: Went straight to some schools’ official Twitter and Instagram pages. Ferris High actually posted a cool team pic, but no names listed! Just faces. Useless.
- MaxPreps / ScoreStream Roulette: Checked those sports sites. Some teams had kinda updated rosters, others had last season’s players, and a few had nothing at all. Couldn’t rely on it. Total inconsistency.
Getting Desperate (and Annoyed)
After wasting most of Tuesday afternoon like this and getting maybe 5 complete rosters out of 25, I was getting frustrated. Needed a better plan. Thought back to how I tracked stuff last year.
Right – calling the athletic departments. That was it. Grabbed my phone Wednesday morning and just started calling schools one by one. Sounds obvious now, but you forget how slow it can be.
Had to leave voicemails for half of them. Some secretaries were super helpful (“Oh sure honey, I got the list right here, what’s your email?”), others needed to transfer me twice and still came back with nothing (“Coach handles that, and he’s out today.”). Took basically the whole day just to get emails out and hope someone replied.
Piecing It All Together
Slowly, over Wednesday and Thursday, the PDFs and spreadsheets trickled into my inbox. Some were typed neatly, others looked like they scanned a handwritten team sheet from 1999. My own dumb fault? I didn’t ask for a specific format. So now I had some JPGs, some DOCX files, and one was literally just names pasted into an email body. Sigh.
Spent Friday morning sitting in my little home office doing the tedious stuff:
- Renaming every single file clearly (West_Valley_HS_Basketball_Roster_2025)
- Converting the random pictures and messy emails into a standard PDF so everything matched.
- Double-checking spellings (is it “Smith” or “Smyth”? Had to check the Ferris Instagram pic again!).
The Final Tally
By Friday afternoon, I finally had it: All 25 team rosters. Not perfect – heights and weights were missing on like half of them – but every player name, number, and grade level was there for every team. Put them all in one big folder on my desktop labeled “SPOKANE TOURNEY 2025 ROOSTERS – FINAL”. You bet I backed that up to the cloud immediately after the last upload.
Seriously folks, just call the damn schools. Forget the websites half the time. Saves hours of clicking and hoping. Learned that lesson again the hard way. Now my buddies (and their kids playing) actually know who’s on the court next week. That feels good. Wish the other parents knew this trick.