Okay, so, today I’m gonna walk you through how I tackled getting the score for the State vs. South Carolina game. It was a bit of a journey, not gonna lie, but hey, that’s what makes it fun, right?
First thing’s first, I needed the data. I started by hitting up the usual sports websites. You know, ESPN, CBS Sports, all those big guys. I figured they’d be the easiest place to grab the score from. I spent a good chunk of time just browsing around, clicking links, trying to find a page that had the live score in a format that wasn’t a pain to deal with. Lots of sites bury it in some crazy Flash player or something, which is just annoying.
Turns out, scraping the actual score off those sites was harder than I thought! They’ve got all sorts of anti-bot stuff in place, and my simple Python script kept getting blocked. Ugh.
So, I had to pivot. Instead of scraping directly, I started looking for APIs. Figured maybe someone out there has a sports API that I could tap into. Did some Googling, and bingo! Found a few options. Some were free with limited access, others were paid services. Since this was just a side project, I opted for one of the free ones. I think it was called “SportDataIO” or something like that? Can’t remember the exact name right now.
Next step: API Key! Signed up for the free tier, and they gave me an API key. Cool. Now I could actually start making requests. I dove into their documentation, which, honestly, was a bit of a mess. But after poking around for a while, I figured out how to make a basic GET request to get the scores for college football games.
Then came the code. I fired up my trusty VS Code and started writing some Python. Used the requests library to make the API call, and json to parse the response. The JSON was pretty nested, so I had to dig through a few layers to find the actual score. Something like data['events'][0]['score']['fulltime'], you know how it is.
Filtering for the right game. The API returned a bunch of games, so I needed to filter it down to just the State vs. South Carolina one. I did this by checking the names of the teams playing. Loop through all the events, and if event['home_team'] == 'State' and event['away_team'] == 'South Carolina', then I knew I had the right game.
Displaying the score. Once I had the score, I just printed it to the console for now. Simple and effective. Something like:
print(f"State: {state_score}")print(f"South Carolina: {south_carolina_score}")
Real-time updates? Not so fast. The free API only updated every 5 minutes or so, so it wasn’t true real-time. But hey, it was good enough for what I needed. If I wanted faster updates, I’d have to pay for a better API.
Final thoughts. Overall, it was a fun little project. Learned a bit about working with APIs and parsing JSON. Plus, I got the score for the game! The biggest hurdle was definitely finding a reliable data source. Scraping is a pain, so APIs are the way to go if you can find one that fits your needs.
What’s next? Maybe I’ll build a little web app to display the score in a nicer format. Or maybe I’ll add notifications so I get alerted when the score changes. Who knows! The possibilities are endless!
