Okay, so, I wanted to keep up with the Montana high school football scores. You know, just casually follow along and see how the teams are doing this season. Nothing too serious, but I figured it would be fun to have a way to check the scores whenever I felt like it.
First, I started looking for a good source of information. You know, a website or an app that would have all the scores in one place. I tried a few different ones, but they were all kind of clunky or didn’t have all the games I was interested in. It was a bit of a pain, honestly.
Then, I thought, “Why not just make my own little system?” I’m not a programmer or anything, but I know my way around a spreadsheet. So, I fired up Google Sheets and started a new one.
I made a few columns: Date, Home Team, Away Team, Home Score, and Away Score. Pretty basic stuff. Then, I started entering the games manually. It took a bit of time each week to find the scores and put them in, but it was kind of satisfying to see it all coming together.
- I realized I could make it a little fancier.
- I added some colors to the team names to make it easier to read.
- And I even figured out how to make a simple formula to highlight the winning team in each game.
Making it easier
After a few weeks, I had a pretty decent little system going. I could just open up the sheet and see all the scores at a glance. But it still took some effort to update it every week.
Then I got a little ambitious. I found a website that had the scores in a pretty consistent format. Not perfect, but good enough. I decided to try and automate the process of getting the scores from the website into my spreadsheet. No more manual entry.
I did some digging and found this thing called “web scraping.” Sounded complicated, but I figured I’d give it a shot. After some trial and error, and a lot of Googling, I managed to write a little script that would grab the scores from the website and put them into my sheet automatically. It was a bit rough around the edges, but it worked! Felt like a real accomplishment.
Now, every week, I just run my script, and boom, my spreadsheet is updated with all the latest scores. It’s not perfect, and sometimes the script breaks if the website changes, but it’s way better than doing it all by hand. Plus, I learned a bunch of stuff along the way.
So, that’s how I ended up with my own little Montana high school football score tracker. It’s not fancy, but it works for me. And it was a fun little project to learn some new things. Maybe next season, I’ll try to add some more features, like team standings or something. Who knows? The possibilities are endless!
