Man, this basketball tournament thing really snowballed on me. Started simple: just wanted quick scores for the WVSSAC Boys thing my nephew was playing in. Couldn’t find a darn thing online that wasn’t hours old. Figured, maybe scratch my own itch, right? Build something stupid simple to track live scores and standings. Famous last words.
The Messy Kickoff
Grabbed my laptop thinking it’d be an afternoon job. First hurdle: finding the game schedules. Expected a nice list somewhere. Nope. Had to scour school websites, crappy PDFs, even some guy’s Google Doc shared on Facebook. Painstakingly copied game times, teams, locations into a spreadsheet like it was the dark ages. Total time suck.
Scraping Ain’t Scraping By
Okay, data’s collected? Needs to live somewhere. Thought I’d be fancy and automate score updates. Ha!
- Some schools used Twitter? Maybe? Tweets looked like “Final score: Tigers roar!! 🐯🏀 #WVHoops”. Useless.
- Others had websites straight outta 2002. Tried scraping… broke instantly when someone posted “JV plays at 5 PM!” in the middle of the score table. Dumb.
- Phoned it in. Literally. Found parents texting scores. Asked if I could be their group text buddy. Felt weird, but hey, data!
Now I’m manually typing scores, standings, all while trying to watch the actual game my nephew was in. Sweating buckets.
Building the Glorified Scoreboard
Thought the hard part was over. Nope. Now I gotta make this usable.
- Wanted a simple webpage. Easy refresh, nice and clean.
- Code looked like spaghetti after two days. Team names changed halfway? “Lincoln High Bears” became just “Bears” on the official sheet. Broke my standings sort.
- Instant alerts? My phone kept buzzing non-stop during dinner. Wife almost killed me.
Pivoted to email blasts. Much quieter. For me, at least. Subscribers probably hated the inbox spam.
Launch Day Chaos
Thought I was golden. Put the site up. Few hundred people trickled in early games. Then, quarterfinals hit.
Traffic went nuts. My cheap hosting whimpered. Site loading slower than a turtle stuck in mud. Panicked. Scaled up the server thingy way beyond budget, praying people just wanted scores, not a fancy UI. Held my breath. It creaked, but held. Mostly. Saw one standings table flipped sideways for like 20 minutes before fixing it. Embarrassing.
Wrapping Up & Real Talk
Once the finals buzzer sounded? Massive relief. Shut down the alerts, froze the standings. Took a screenshot for posterity before turning off the server money pit. So much effort for a month-long tournament!
What did I learn?
- Live stuff is way harder than static stuff. Chaos every dang day.
- School sports data? Wild West. No standards, pure anarchy.
- Manual data entry under pressure? No fun. Zero stars.
Honestly? Don’t know if I’ll ever do this exact mess again. But hey, nephew got his scores real-time. And maybe saved a few other fans some frantic clicking. Just next time? I’m charging. Or finding a co-sufferer.