VarsityApex
A proof of concept for data portability in legacy record systems, built on ATProto. High school sports is the test case.
- Problem
- Most results systems expect two teams and one score. Track, swimming, wrestling, golf and cross country end up as PDFs, or never get posted.
- System
- It imports the files schools already make and publishes results that a school, conference or state association can each run a site from.
- Mechanics
- Every contest is a GAME, a DUAL or a MEET, so one site carries all 45 activities. A resolver matches school names and holds unclear ones for a person. Each import keeps its file name, parser and SHA-256 hash.
- Stack
- AT Protocol and standard.site records; parsers for Hy-Tek reports, CSV box scores and match cards.
- Result
- A working prototype that publishes a sample state season, 7A to 1A, from the original files with nothing retyped.
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
Basketball gets a website, while track, swimming, wrestling, golf, and cross country often get a PDF, if that. VarsityApex handles games, duals, and meets without forcing a time, distance, judged score, or placement into the same kind of number. It also has to identify the schools named in each file. A resolver checks names and aliases, records how it found a match, and leaves ambiguous ones for review instead of guessing. Only then do results become records that schools, leagues, and associations can publish and reuse.
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.