So, about these OBA standings, right? It’s one of those things you don’t think about until you’re right in the thick of it, and then it’s all you can think about. For me, it started a few years back. My kid joined this local basketball league – the OBA, as everyone called it. Good fun, kids running around, parents cheering, you know the drill.
The Initial Mess
But the standings! Oh boy. Trying to figure out where my kid’s team, the “Little Hoopers,” actually stood was a nightmare. The official website, if you could even call it that, looked like something from the dial-up era. Updates were, let’s say, sporadic. Sometimes weeks would go by with no new scores. You’d hear one parent say, “I think we won three games,” and another would say, “No, it was two, and one tie that they haven’t counted yet.” It was pure chaos.
I’m the kind of guy who likes things organized. Not like super intense, but, you know, basic stuff. And this wasn’t basic. This was just… a void where information should have been.
My Bright Idea (or so I thought)
So, one weekend, after another confusing chat with other parents, I thought, “How hard can it be? I’ll just track it myself.” I had a bit of time on my hands back then. I’d just finished up a big project at work that nearly fried my brain, and I was in that weird lull where you’re looking for something, anything, to occupy your mind that isn’t spreadsheets about quarterly earnings.
My grand plan involved:
- Getting the game schedule (that was actually available, surprisingly).
- Asking our team’s coach for our scores after each game.
- Trying to get scores from other parents for the other teams.
Sounds simple, right? Wrong. So wrong.
The Grind and the Frustration
Getting our own team’s scores was easy enough. Our coach was pretty good about it. But other teams? It was like pulling teeth. Some coaches were responsive, some just ignored my emails. Some parents had the scores, others had conflicting information. It was like trying to piece together a puzzle with half the pieces missing and the other half belonging to a different puzzle altogether.
I started with a simple notebook. Then I upgraded to an Excel sheet. I even fiddled around with some free online database thingy for a bit, thinking I could make it all fancy. But the core problem wasn’t the tool; it was the data. Garbage in, garbage out, as they say.
I remember this one time, I spent a whole Saturday afternoon calling around, trying to confirm a single game’s score. One coach told me 34-30, the other insisted it was 32-32 but they played an overtime period that “didn’t count for the league” but “should count for morale.” What do you even do with that?
A Little Side Story
It reminds me of this one job I had, years ago. We were trying to launch this new product, and the marketing team had one set of numbers, sales had another, and R&D was living on a completely different planet. We’d have these big meetings, and everyone would present their “data,” and nothing matched. It was just people talking past each other. This OBA standings thing felt a lot like that, just with less PowerPoint and more sweaty gym socks.
Back then, at that job, my boss told me, “Just make it work.” Yeah, thanks. Super helpful. That’s kind of how I felt with these OBA standings. Everyone wanted to know, but no one wanted to do the legwork to make the information available and accurate.
What Happened in the End?
So, did I become the OBA standings hero? Not really. I managed to keep a semi-accurate, unofficial log for my kid’s age group for that one season. It was mostly for our team and a few friendly rival teams whose parents were also in my little information-sharing circle. It was better than nothing, I guess. We at least had some idea of where we stood before the official, super-late standings finally lumbered onto the website like a dinosaur waking from a nap.
The next season, someone else, a parent who actually knew how to build a proper little web app, took over for that age group. Thank goodness. My Excel sheet was starting to look like a Jackson Pollock painting of numbers and question marks.
It was a bit of a thankless task, honestly. Lots of effort for something that should have just been there. But hey, it kept me busy, and I learned a valuable lesson: sometimes, even with the best intentions, you just can’t fix a broken system from the outside with just a notebook and a bunch of phone calls. And that the world of volunteer-run youth sports is a wonderfully chaotic place.
