River Falls Wrestling Club
River Falls Wrestling
- 630
- wrestler records converted out of an 82-sheet spreadsheet
- 2
- state champions the club's own record book had lost
- $0
- a month, against $3,588 a year for the vendor version
Full disclosure before anything else: this is my own kids'' wrestling club and I sit on the booster board, so I am not a neutral party here. I am including it because it is the clearest example I have of the actual job ... which is usually not building a website, it is looking at what something costs and what it is worth.
The record board
The club wanted a digital record board in the gym. The obvious route is a turnkey vendor: roughly $3,588 a year, and the screens stop working the day you stop paying. Over five years that is eighteen to twenty thousand dollars and the club owns nothing at the end of it.
The version we built runs about $5,500 once, $0 a month, and the club owns the hardware. Before anyone committed to that, it got proved out on a $170 mini PC plugged into the 55-inch TVs the program already hauls to tournaments, so the athletic director could look at the real thing on a real screen instead of a quote.
Then the data turned out to be the actual project
The record book was a spreadsheet. Eighty-two sheets, going back to the class of 1964, sixty-five of them one graduating class each. Converting it meant reconciling 630 wrestler records against several sources that did not agree with each other.
Two state champions came out of that reconciliation who were not on the spreadsheet''s own champions sheet ... Nathan Fuller at 152 in 2019, and Vito Massa at 285 in 2022. That sheet stops counting titles in 2006, and it is the sheet a sign vendor would have quoted from. Both of those young men would have had their names left off a board in their own gym.
The conversion also found a block of results labelled 2006-07 that were actually from 1996-97, which had been quietly inventing wrestlers who did not exist, plus sixty-three names on leaderboards with no matching wrestler behind them. All of it is written up, with the ones only the club can settle flagged for a human rather than guessed at.
Why it is on this site
Because it is the same work. Somebody is about to pay a subscription forever for something they could own, and the interesting part of the job is not the screen ... it is the spreadsheet nobody wanted to open.
