Alright folks, grabbed my coffee this morning, sat down at my ancient laptop, and remembered – hell, the 2024 high school football season kicks off soon! My nephew’s playing for the Maumee Panthers this year, wanna catch his games. Totally spaced on where the dang schedule was posted. Figured it’d be simple. Boy, was I wrong.
Started how everyone does. Punched “Maumee Panthers 2024 football schedule” straight into the big search engine. Bam! Tons of links popped up. Felt relieved, thought it was a five-second job. Clicked the first one looking legit – some random sports forum page from like, 2018. Total garbage. Dead end.
Okay, no biggie. Tried the next one. It wanted me to sign up for some “premium high school sports newsletter”. Uh huh. Next! Saw what looked like an official athletics page link. Heart rate settled. Clicked it. Got nothing but ads popping up like crazy, and one of those “Download Flash Player Update now” warnings. Slammed that back button so fast my mouse squeaked. Classic mess. Felt stupid wasting ten minutes already.
Decided to actually think for a second. Duh. The school district! Maumee has a school, right? Searched specifically for the Maumee High School website. Found it eventually. Navigation was… well, a challenge. Found an “Athletics” tab, buried under some menus. Clicked around. Saw “Sports Schedules”. Now we’re cooking!
Hold up though. Under “Sports Schedules”, they had about twenty different sports listed. Where’s football?! Scrolled down, felt like forever. Finally saw “Football”. Almost clicked off because it just blended in. Why isn’t it prominent?! Crazy.
Clicked “Football”. Got the team page. Looked around. Team picture, coach’s bio, blah blah. Where’s the schedule?! Started scanning the page top to bottom. Found “Team News” – just old stuff. Clicked “Calendar”. Now it showed events mixed together – booster meetings, picture day… football games lost in the jumble. Argh!
Finally. My eyes caught a tiny sub-heading off to the side called “2024 Varsity Football Schedule“. Seriously? Took me scrolling up and down the damn page three times to spot it. Was right there! Felt simultaneously relieved and ticked off. All that hassle for something hiding in plain sight on the school’s own darn site.
There it was. All the dates, the opponents, home and away. Printed the page right then and there. No more fancy searching. Straight to the source is the only way that worked. Lesson learned? When hunting high school sports schedules online, skip the middlemen and headlock the school’s website. Probably should’ve started there.