VarsityApex
A decentralized data platform for high school sports — built on ATProto.
Local papers covering high school sports are decimated, and what’s left is often paywalled — so families end up with no way to follow a kid, grandkid, or former teammate’s season from anywhere but the bleachers. Meanwhile the results themselves aren’t actually missing: they exist in Hy-Tek printouts, spreadsheets, and scorebooks schools already produce every week. They’re just scattered, inconsistent, and never connected to anything. VarsityApex is a demonstration of what happens if you stop treating that as unsolvable.
One sport, then every sport
Right now, coverage quality depends entirely on the sport: basketball gets a website, while track, swimming, wrestling, golf, and cross country get a PDF, if that. VarsityApex models every contest as one of three shapes — games, duals, or meets — so the same pipeline handles a basketball score, a wrestling dual, and a track meet without treating any of them as a special case. Results move through extraction, normalization, identity resolution, and validation, then distribute as standardized records up through school, league, state, and national levels.
Why ATProto
The part that makes this more than a nicer database is where the records live. VarsityApex uses ATProtocol so schools keep their results in open formats on their own personal data servers, rather than locked inside whatever vendor they happen to be using this year — so a school can migrate platforms without losing its history. It also means an athlete’s results can follow them as a single portable profile across every sport they play, for all four years of high school, instead of living in four disconnected systems.
Where it stands
The prototype works, and the public tour is live. Getting this in front of real conferences or state associations is the next phase — and since, as anyone who’s dealt with an athletic department knows, associations and schools are cash-strapped, that step likely runs through civic or grant funding rather than a sales cycle. I wrote more about the thinking behind it, and the state of high school sports data generally, in this piece.