Add Perfect Game to Discoverable organizations

[PhilB]

Can you please add Perfect Game to the list of organizations that can be Discovered?

Thanks,
-phil

[FTMSupport]

We have not seen anywhere that they provide rosters. If you know someone from perfect game that we could talk to about discovering anything they may have available, we would be happy to add them. You can have them contact us at support@iscoresports.com.

[PhilB]

My son is just now getting to the age of PG tournaments, so I don't have much experience with them yet. I have found that if you go to a tournament page (such as this one http://www.perfectgame.org/events/Defau ... event=1213) there is a section titled "Participating Teams". In this section the have a list of all of the teams. The names are links to the team's roster.

So for example if you click on Academy Select Sun Devils at the link above you'll get the roster for that team here: http://www.perfectgame.org/events/Tourn ... x?id=16843. Perfect Game has the most complete roster system I have seen of any organization with player name, jersey number and position. It appears like every team has a unique identifier, so I assume you can use a system similar to how you get roster information from USSSA or Nations where the user would provide the team ID number then you download the data from the PG website and parse the roster information.

If you want to get real fancy you could provide the option to download the rosters of all of the teams in the tournament if the user provides the tournament event number.

Regards,
-phil

[FTMSupport]

We have sent them an email to see if they have any way we can access their rosters. We will let you know what we hear back.

[PhilB]

We have sent them an email to see if they have any way we can access their rosters. We will let you know what we hear back.

FTM,

Did you get a response from Perfect Game?

It looks like the roster data for a team is standardized on the PG website available here: http://www.perfectgame.org/events/Tourn ... px?id=TEAM#" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;, where TEAM# is unique for a specific team. With this information can you not parse the HTML code within iScore to extract team name, player name and number information?

So if a user knows the TEAM#, which they can get from each tournament page, then the Discover process could be used to load the PG roster web page for that team, parse the data, and populate the new team information. This would be much easier for a user to do than to have to manually create a new team and populate the roster data by hand.

-phil

[FTMSupport]

They did not respond. How would you get a team ID from the site? If you give us an example of how to search the data, and it does not require logging in, we may be able to do something with it.

[PhilB]

They did not respond. How would you get a team ID from the site? If you give us an example of how to search the data, and it does not require logging in, we may be able to do something with it.

Please see this post above (posting.php?mode=quote&f=4&p=34817#pr33394" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;) for reference. When I go to a Perfect Game tournament web page (like the one linked in the post above), there is a list of participating teams. If I put my cursor over a team name in the list of participating teams then I can see the team number in the link address. If I left click on that team link then the team roster web page is loaded. Another way to get to the team roster page is to type in the URL http://www.perfectgame.org/events/Tourn ... r.aspx?id=" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;TEAM# where TEAM# is the team number that I found from the team page link as above.

In the HTML source for that web page if you search for "ContentPlaceHolder1_lblTeamName",you can extract the team name as the content following the id tag which contains that search term. For example for the team Academy Select Sun Devils (http://www.perfectgame.org/events/Tourn ... x?id=16843" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;, with a team number of 16843) then the team name can be parsed out of this string in the HTML source: <span id="ContentPlaceHolder1_lblTeamName" style="font-size:Larger;font-weight:bold;">Academy Select Sun Devils</span><br/>

Similarly the roster jersey information can be determined by parsing the player number from this tag: "ContentPlaceHolder1_dgRosterFull_lblUniform_0" where the final character spans from 0 to the number of players in the team-1 (for this team 11).

Similarly the roster name information can be determined by parsing the player name from this tag: "ContentPlaceHolder1_dgRosterFull_hlName_0" where the final character spans from 0 to the number of players in the team-1 (for this team 11).

So the way I would propose that you create a new team from a PG team roster web page is to first search for the team name with the tag "ContentPlaceHolder1_lblTeamName".
Next search for the first instance of "ContentPlaceHolder1_dgRosterFull_lblUniform_" use that as player1 jersey number, then search for "ContentPlaceHolder1_dgRosterFull_lblUniform_" and use that as player1 name.
Search for "ContentPlaceHolder1_dgRosterFull_lblUniform_" again and use that as player2 jersey number, then search for "ContentPlaceHolder1_dgRosterFull_lblUniform_" and use that as player2 name.
repeat for all players on the roster.

If you want to get fancy you could also extract the fielding position and batting/throwing arm information as well.

Unfortunately I don't see anywhere in the HTML source where they list the total number of players so you would have to keep searching for the string "ContentPlaceHolder1_dgRosterFull_lblUniform_" until it no longer appears in the file, at which point you have extracted all of the roster information.

Now I'm not an expert on the PG web page, but my searches through a few PG tournaments, and of several teams make me believe that they use this same HTML format for all of the team rosters so the method above should work for any PG team.

Does this description make sense, or are you looking for something else?

Thanks,
-phil

[PhilB]

Ping. FTM please respond to post above. Thanks

-phil

[FTMSupport]

We still do not see any way to search for data on the site. The links you gave are to specific pages on the site, but they do not seem to have a "search for team" option. Without the ability to Search, the data is not very useful.

We would suggest that maybe as a customer of theirs, you send them an email saying you would like to see integration with iScore and that iScore tried reaching out to them but got no response. We would be happy to add the Discover functionality if they would give us a way to do it.

[PhilB]

We still do not see any way to search for data on the site. The links you gave are to specific pages on the site, but they do not seem to have a "search for team" option. Without the ability to Search, the data is not very useful.

Perhaps I'm simplifying the process to discover team in iScore, but it seems to me that the team ID# is sufficient to get the team roster information, assuming that you can parse the HTML page for that team roster.

For example with both USSSA and Nations a user can either search for a team by name, or by ID#. I assume that is true for the other organizations that you can import roster data from as well.

I agree that there is no method to search for a team by name in perfect game, but it is easy for someone to find the team ID# as I described above. So the method that i envision using to discover a perfect game tournament team on iScore is: Find the tournament page on the PG website. Select the team to find it's ID#. Insert that ID# when prompted by iScore in the Discover page. Have iScore load the team page and parse the team name and roster information.

Will that process not work on iScore?

I'm not a "customer" of perfect game per se'. I'm just the parent of a child who will play in a perfect game tournament with 76 teams entered. I'd like to find a way to simplify creating 76 rosters on iScore. I doubt that I would have any more success asking perfect game for help than you as they don't know me from Adam.

Thank you,
-phil