2024 Boeing Classic Leaderboard: Follow the Action, See Who Leads.

Alright, so I decided to take a shot at the “Boeing Classic Leaderboard” thing. I’d seen some chatter about it online, and figured, why not? I’m no coding whiz, but I like a good challenge.

First, I needed to find the actual leaderboard. I did a bit of searching and, yep, there it was. Looks like it is a golf tournament. I am not a golf player. But there is a leaderboard.

I started by just looking at the page. I opened up the developer tools in my browser – you know, that thing you get to by right-clicking and hitting “Inspect” or “Inspect Element.” I wanted to see how the data was structured. Was it a table? A list? Some crazy complicated thing?

2024 Boeing Classic Leaderboard: Follow the Action, See Who Leads.

It turned out to be, well, kinda messy. There were a bunch of nested

tags, and it took me a bit of scrolling and clicking around to figure out how the player names, scores, and positions were organized. I’m not gonna lie, it wasn’t super intuitive.

First thing I noticed: Each player seemed to have their own little block of HTML.
Inside that block, there were more
s, some with classes like “player-name,” “position,” and “total-score.” Those seemed promising!
The actual data (like “Tiger Woods” or “-5”) was just plain text inside those
s.

So, I thought, “Okay, I can probably grab this stuff.” I decided to use a web scraping tool, the data I want is pretty simple.

I fiddled around with the selectors. I found out I got all the player blocks. I tested it a few times to make sure I was getting what I wanted.

Then, I added more selectors to get the specific bits of data – the player name, their position, and their score. I got all the names, all the scores, etc., into this big ol’ list.

The final step was to put it all together. I’m not even a big coding guy. All I want to do is to get the data.

It wasn’t perfect, mind you. I probably missed some edge cases, and if the website changes its structure, my whole thing will probably break. But hey, I got something working, and I learned a bit about how websites are put together. That’s a win in my book!