The Beginning of a Headache, Sort Of
So, there’s this local basketball league, right? The WBL. Good games, lots of spirit, all that. But getting the scores? Man, what a nightmare. Seriously. You’d think in this day and age, it’d be simple. Nope. Not for us, not initially.
It was the usual chaos. Someone would try to remember to jot them down. Maybe a quick photo of a dusty whiteboard, if you were lucky. Then texts flying around, or posts on some random social media page that half the people didn’t even use. It was just… messy. You’d have parents and players asking all week, “Hey, what was the score of that game?” Drove me nuts.
My Brilliant Idea (Not Really)
I figured, okay, how hard can this be? I’m not some tech genius, but I can usually figure things out. My first thought was super simple: a shared document. You know, like one of those online spreadsheet things. Easy, right? Wrong. So, so wrong.
That lasted about a week. People would forget to update it. Or they’d type in the wrong scores. Or someone would accidentally delete half the data. It was more trouble than it was worth. Honestly, it made things even more confusing. Back to square one, pretty much.
Alright, Let’s Get Slightly More Serious
So, I decided I had to try and build something a bit more… stable. Nothing fancy, mind you. I just wanted a place where the scores could live, and people could find them without a treasure hunt. I started poking around with some basic web page stuff. I mean, how complex could displaying a few numbers be?
Well, turns out, getting the actual, correct scores consistently was the first big hurdle. I had to chat with the league folks, try to get them to send me info in a way I could actually use. Sometimes it worked, sometimes I was still just getting texts at all hours and having to type it all in myself. My evenings were thrilling, let me tell you.
Then there was making it look okay. I wanted it to be usable on a phone, ’cause that’s where everyone checks stuff. Spent way too much time fiddling with layouts and fonts, trying to make it not look like something from 1998. It still kinda does, but hey, it functions.
The “Joy” of Maintenance
Once I got a basic version up, that was just the beginning. Updating it became my new hobby. After every game day, there I was, punching in scores, checking for typos. It felt like a part-time job I hadn’t signed up for. My family started to wonder if I loved that little score page more than them. Not entirely untrue some nights.
I did manage to make a few small tweaks. Got one of the league volunteers to send me the results in a slightly more organized way. That helped a bit. I even cobbled together a tiny script, if you can even call it that, to help me get the info onto the page a bit faster. It’s clunky, it breaks sometimes, but it’s better than typing every single digit by hand.
So, Where Are We Now?
We have this… thing. It’s a simple page. No bells, no whistles. Sometimes the updates are a bit delayed if I’m swamped or the info doesn’t come through. But, most of the time, the scores are there. People can find them. It’s not perfect. Far from it.
But you know what? It’s a heck of a lot better than blurry whiteboard photos and a million text messages. And I guess there was some satisfaction in wrestling with it and getting something, anything, to work. Plus, people stopped asking me directly for scores quite as much. That alone was almost worth all the hassle. Almost.
