Man, talk about a headache. Trying to follow div 3 hockey scores, you’d think it’d be simple, right? Wrong. It’s like they’re actively trying to hide ’em. My nephew, little Jimmy, plays for the Wildcats, and my sister’s always asking me, “Did they win? What was the score?” And I’m there, digging through websites that look like they were made in 1998.
Fed Up, Decided to Do It Myself
So, after weeks of this nonsense, I finally said, enough’s enough. If the leagues can’t be bothered to make it easy, I’ll figure something out. I’m not a pro coder or anything, but I know my way around a computer a bit. My goal wasn’t fancy, just get the scores, maybe the schedule, in one place for the family.
The Great Score Hunt Begins
First off, I went looking. I mean, really looking. Official league sites? Some were okay, others updated like once a blue moon. Local news sites? Sometimes they’d have a blurb, sometimes nothing. It was a real patchwork. I thought, surely there’s some easy feed, like an API or something you can just tap into? For Division 3 hockey? Yeah, right. Keep dreaming. That stuff’s for the big leagues, I guess.
So, the next step was a bit rougher around the edges. I found a couple of regional sports sites that were kinda reliable, but the scores were buried deep, like three clicks in and hidden under a weird menu. I figured, okay, if I can see it on the page with my own eyes, maybe I can get my computer to grab it for me. That’s when I remembered some basic stuff about web scraping I’d read about ages ago. Not the cleanest way to do things, I know, but when you’re desperate for those Wildcats scores, you do what you gotta do.
Getting My Hands Dirty with Code
I fired up my old trusty laptop and started messing around with some Python. Just simple scripts, really, nothing too complicated. The idea was to tell the computer, “Go to this webpage, find the table that looks like it has the scores, and pull out the team names and the numbers next to them.” Sounds easy when you say it like that, but man, it was a pain in the neck. One site would change its layout without warning, and boom, my script would break. Then I’d have to go back in and tweak the code, trying to figure out what they changed.
I probably spent a good few weekends on it, bit by bit. Figuring out how to handle when a game was postponed, or when the site just decided to format things in a completely bizarre way that day. It was like a constant little battle, me against those stubborn websites. I wasn’t building Fort Knox here, just something to stop my sister’s constant “any updates?” texts!
Making it (Sort Of) Usable for the Fam
Once I got the scripts pulling data somewhat reliably – and I use “reliably” loosely – I needed a way to actually see it without having to run code every five minutes. So, I put together a super basic webpage. We’re talking plain, old HTML. I mean, it was ugly. Think basic text, maybe a list or two. I used some <ul> tags to list out stuff like:
- Upcoming games for the Wildcats
- Recent scores we cared about (mostly Wildcats, sometimes their rivals)
- Sometimes I’d try to add standings if I could actually find ’em consistently
I plopped this onto one of those free web hosting things you can find online. No fancy database, no user accounts, nothing like that. Just a simple page that my script would try to update every so often with the new info it found. It was clunky, for sure, but it was mine, and it showed the scores, most of the time!
The “Good Enough” Result, For Now
So now, there’s this very plain, very unofficial page that my family uses. My sister can check it, my brother-in-law too, even my nephew peeks at it sometimes. Is it perfect? Heck no. Sometimes a score is late, or a game gets missed entirely if a site changes its whole structure before I notice and fix my script. But it’s way, way better than the old way of hunting for scraps of info across a dozen different, poorly maintained websites. Honestly, it’s a bit ridiculous you have to go to these lengths for something so simple. You’d think the leagues themselves would want people to easily follow their teams, even in Div 3. Give ’em a bit of exposure, you know? But hey, at least for the Wildcats, we’ve got our little makeshift system. And I learned a bit more about how frustrating and sometimes strangely rewarding it can be to wrestle with data on the web. It’s still a work in progress, always will be, probably. But it beats sifting through ancient-looking websites every Saturday night, that’s for sure.
