VT Scores

VT Scores is Vermont’s high school sports scoreboard: one current, readable place for scores, schedules, standings, school pages, and postseason results. The information was spread across newspapers, national databases, scheduling systems, tournament brackets, and a twenty-year paper archive. VT Scores brings it together in one trustworthy source that works on a phone.

Behind the public site, the system gathers information from those sources, checks it, and keeps it up to date. It also includes the tools I use to manage the data, and I maintain it against live, frequently messy source material.

The challenge

The hard part was not simply building a website. Scores arrive as written reports, schedules come from a system shared unpredictably by school teams that share players, and standings come from a national database with incomplete dates. Schools can share names with schools in other states, a team can be shared by several schools, and the same game can arrive from two sources.

The product needed clear rules for recognising the same game, identifying teams, and deciding which source to trust. Those decisions also had to stay consistent as new information arrived every day.

What we built

One reliable place for the information. Separate collection processes bring each source into one shared system. A public site and a private admin area make the information useful, with a controlled connection between them.

Consistent records. Before anything is published, the system checks it and compares it with what is already there. Each school has one identity, so it does not get confused with a school in another state, and teams shared by several schools are shown accurately. Standings and championship outcomes are calculated from game results instead of entered by hand, including the different formats used for team and individual tournaments.

Public site. Visitors can see current and past scores, standings, school and sport pages, postseason brackets, and player and team statistics. They can also subscribe to calendars and receive score reminders without sharing identifying information. A news digest brings together coverage from local newsrooms and works even when scripts are turned off.

Admin and operations. A simple admin area shows whether updates ran, what changed, and who has access. A written daily update guide makes the work repeatable.

Outcome

VT Scores is live and updated daily, covering eighteen sports across team and individual competition. It shows which schools make up a shared team and supports multi-division postseason results, drawing on newspapers, national databases, scheduling systems, third-party news, and a historical archive.

The project also shows the operating discipline behind it: a written, repeatable guide replaces knowledge held by one person; access rules are built into the system itself, so protection does not depend on what the screen shows; and bad updates are stopped before they reach the public site.