When my grade school daughter was playing parks and recreation basketball decades ago, she and I started going to girls' basketball games at our local high school. As the season end approached I looked for on-line sources that would give various teams' records so one could tell who was any good out there. Didn't find much, so I began collecting in a spreadsheet scores gleaned from the newspaper and on line sources.
My first thought was to collect for all teams: boys and girls. I soon concluded this was a fool's errand and limited the scope to AA and AAA girls teams. 1997-1998 was the first year I attempted to compile all games for such teams. When the WIAA re-balanced classifications in 2006, many of the 3A teams I had followed dropped to 2A. So I expanded the scope to include that classification. Beginning with 2012-2013 I added boys games for 2A, 3A, and 4A. In the summer of 2013 I pulled historical data from several on-line sites. I thought the project of integrating that data would take a couple of weeks. Inconsistent data between the sites and a high rate of errors requiring tedious checking of individual game facts dragged out the work to about a year. Since I had pulled in data for all classifications, I decided for 2013-2014 to take up that fool's errand and collect scores for every school, girls and boys. I continue to go backwards to pick up results: those I missed at the time, teams I didn't follow at the time, and even whole years prior to starting my collecting.
The data for this site comes from many sources:
On-line newspapers
Physical
newspapers
Scanned archives of physical newspapers
Text
newspaper archives
League and district web sites
WIAA web
site
Several high school sports data sites
Individual high
school sites
State tournament programs
Bill Pierce's GSL
Almanac
My own notes from games attended
Email responses
from individual coaches
For some games I don't have the numeric score. Sometimes the game outcome is reported with no score or a score that is difficult to read from a newspaper scan. For games in a tournament, the advancement of a team in the bracket is the evidence for the outcome for the unreported game. Other times I have used reliable published standings to determine the outcome for league games I am missing. It is possible to reasonably guess the date and location for some missing games. I have done so where I have good confidence in the estimate.
The current state of contemporary data has declined over the past several years. Many newspapers have reduced coverage of games and some have dropped day-to-day coverage entirely. WPAN, based out of Whatcom County, was purchased in 2020 by VNN from Michigan resulting in a loss of in-state knowledge. While the WIAA was using MaxPreps for RPI calculation, the quality of the MaxPreps data improved greatly. Coaches and athletic directors reported and checked the data. However since 2021, after WIAA dropped MaxPreps as a provider and after game referees started reporting the scores to Score Arbiter, the data quality has dropped significantly. Why should referees be reporting game scores? Aren't there other people at the score table better whose job it is to keep track of the score? Most games don't have independent reporting in a newspaper. For those that do, the score reported by referees is often wrong.
Some years have little data, especially for the boys. Filling in that data is on the 'to do' list.
If the HTML seems clunky and old that is because it is. The basic presentation has changed little since 1998. The pages are quite compact when compared to commercial sites.
Marc Uhlig; contact at teambrunnhilde.com (you can figure out how to form an email address from that; hopefully a bot can not).