A scheduling tool for Philadelphia Area Disc Alliance's (PADA) Fairmount Park Summer League (FPSL).
Every Summer PADA organizes an Ultimate Frisbee league for over 500 participants. Unlike other leagues with field sites spread throughout the Philadelphia region, FPSL is hosted in Fairmount Park on one big field. With over 30 teams, weekly games have to be scheduled over multiple weeknights. So even if you have friends playing FPSL you aren't guaranteed to be playing on the same night.
The website used to show each team's schedule leaves much to be desired. Any time you wanted to compare your schedule to your friend's schedule you'd have to go through the following procedure:
- Navigate to your team page
- Navigate to your team's schedule
- Open a new tab and navigate to the league standings
- Navigate to your friend's team page via the standings (maybe send a text and ask what team they're on)
- Navigate to your friend's team's schedule
- Repeat steps 3-5 for multiple friends
- Switch back and forth between tabs and try to figure out all overlapping dates.
Comparing two schedules was arduous enough but comparing any more than three schedules was too much of a hassle. Maybe you'd text the friends you really wanted to see, but otherwise you'd show up, see who you saw, and miss whoever you didn't.
Enter FriendsPSL! By compiling all available player data and webscraping the constantly changing team schedules, FriendsPSL is able to take a list of players and output a schedule that is formatted and easy to read.
Now you can say hello to (or avoid 🙈) all the people who you know will be at the fields on any given night!
After getting lots of positive feedback from FPSL users, I started to make the site available to other leagues that PADA offers. Maintaining and updating is still the biggest challenge and the next step for this project will be creating documentation for the process of adding/removing leagues.
