Scraping Indiana high school football dates in 2024
This Friday afternoon, just sittin’ at my desk thinkin’ about my nephew’s varsity season startin’ soon. Realized nobody shared that dang schedule online yet. Figured I’d just grab the whole Indiana schedule myself.
Step one was pure confusion. Searched “2024 Indiana high school football schedule” expecting an official PDF or something. Dumb mistake. First hits were news sites mentioning ONE school’s schedule or some “top 10 matchups” fluff piece. Zero help.
Changed gears real quick. Remembered Indiana High School Athletic Association runs the show. Headed straight to their site. Took forever hunting for the “Football” tab buried under basketball and volleyball listings. Found it. Annnnd… nothing. Just empty grids saying “Schedule coming soon!” Last year’s data still showing. Big fat fail.
Time for plan C. Started pounding coffee and thought: local papers might’ve scraped data before I did. Went to three county newspaper sites. Found schedules there! But only for schools in their tiny coverage area. Had to:
- Grab dates from Hendricks County’s site
- Puzzle over Fort Wayne schools via some regional sports blog
- Scroll through Twitter rants about “Why won’t Carmel post theirs?!”
The biggest headache? Different formats everywhere! Some used calendars. Others just ugly lists. Gary schools had times but no opponents. Evansville listed opponents but forgot kickoff times. Half the places called teams “East” or “West” without mentioning the actual school name. Had to cross-reference mascots on school district pages like some detective.
All night copy-pasting hell. My Excel sheet became a disaster zone. Pasted South Bend games in backwards. Mixed up Columbus North and Columbus East twice. Almost threw my keyboard realizing Bloomington North’s “8/23” date followed a Thursday schedule while everyone else started Friday. Seriously, who does that?
Final gut punch? The IHSAA site finally updated their master schedule… while I was formatting my last PDF export. Wasted twelve hours scraping trash data when I could’ve just waited two more days. Classic. But hey, my version has junior varsity dates too. Small win.
So if you see that 2024 schedule floating around Indiana forums? Yeah, that chaotic Google Sheet mess with the messed up Columbus games? That’s mine. My nephew still hasn’t thanked me. Probably playing video games. Whatever.