Okay, so I wanted to keep better track of golf tournaments, specifically the Cognizant Classic. Here’s how I went about getting the 2024 leaderboard info, and honestly, it was a bit of a journey.
My Initial Plan (That Failed)
First, I thought, “Easy peasy! I’ll just write a quick script!” I figured I could scrape some website and pull the data. Yeah, that was overly optimistic.
Hitting a Wall
Turns out, most of the sites with live leaderboards are pretty good at, you know, not letting random scripts grab their data. They have all sorts of protections in place. It’s like they don’t want me to easily access the information. Weird, right?
Changing My Approach
So, scraping was a no-go. I needed a different method. I spent a bunch of time searching for a reliable, free, and preferably easy-to-use source. I am not a coder!
The Manual Method (It Works!)
I gave up on automation, at least for now.
I decided just to manually check a couple of trusted sports news sites. I can usually find what I need with the updates.
What I Looked For
I made a little checklist of what I wanted to record:
- Player Names: Obviously, I needed to know who was playing.
- Current Scores: This is the heart of the leaderboard, of course.
- Round Number: To know how far along in the tournament things were.
- Through: How many holes they have completed.
My Simple System
Instead of a database or anything fancy, I just made a simple note on my computer.
This way, I can easily see how the leaderboard is changing.
Lessons Learned
This whole thing taught me a few things:
-
Sometimes, the simplest approach is the best.
-
Web scraping can be much harder than it first appears.
-
I have got all the updates of the game that I looked for!
So, that’s my not-so-glamorous, but ultimately effective, way of keeping up with the Cognizant Classic leaderboard. It’s not automated, but it gets the job done!
