A side project, taken seriously
The
Tag Up
Any college baseball score, instantly.
A fast, fan-first home for live college baseball scores, schedules, and standings. Built by Charlie Hawk to fix a problem every college baseball fan knows and nobody had bothered to solve.
The problem
Nobody can find a college baseball score
to find the score of a college baseball game today, if you know where to look.
for an NFL or MLB score: Google hands you a live score card before you finish typing.
College baseball has no central, discoverable home for scores. The data exists, but it’s scattered and effectively invisible to the average fan. The best existing score products don’t rank on Google and aren’t surfaced where fans already are. The major sites treat college baseball as a side feature, buried under everything else.
The telling detail: an avid college baseball fan with a data and software background had never heard of the best existing tools. That fan was the founder. Which means this is a distribution problem, not a product-existence problem.
The insight
A distribution play, not a software play
NFL and MLB scores surface natively on Google because structured data flows from sports-data partners into the Knowledge Graph. Coverage is strong for the pro leagues and weak for niche sports. That’s not a technical mystery; it’s work nobody has done for college baseball.
The data is cheap. The discoverability is the hard part, and that is the actual competitive advantage: get college baseball into the pipeline properly, and own the SEO surface area for every long-tail score query the majors ignore.
The build
SEO as architecture, not decoration
Because discoverability is the whole thesis, it can’t be bolted on. Score content is server-rendered with Next.js so Google receives fully formed HTML, never a client-side shell. Team and conference pages are core routes from the first commit, because those URLs are the distribution strategy: they’re what ranks for “[team] baseball score today.”
Schema.org structured data runs throughout, and everything is mobile-first, optimized for one job: a fan checking one score in five seconds on their phone during dinner.
- Next.js App Router
- TypeScript
- SSR / SSG
- Schema.org
- Long-tail SEO
- Mobile-first
The road ahead
Scoreboard first, coverage next
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Phase 1
The scoreboard
Real D1 scores, live and fast: the glance view and the deep view.
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Phase 2
Distribution & SEO
Own the long-tail queries, ship structured data everywhere, and pursue inclusion in Google’s score-surfacing pipeline.
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Phase 3
Coverage that doesn’t exist
Conference beat coverage generated from the data itself: the daily writing no human writer can economically provide for every conference.