Cleveland winter league draft web application
January 27, 2016
Drafts are fun. I love drafting in fantasy sports, and although it gets a litle muckier when doing it for an ultimate frisbee league with many of my friends, it is still something I have wasted hours and days on, thinking about strategies, rankings, and the like.
Drafts in Cleveland’s winter league for ultimate is a bit different than a typical snake draft. Instead of teams taking turns picking individual players, players of either gender may be “bagged” together, and instead of a prefixed draft order, the order changes dynamically based on the sums of each team’s player ratings and the section of the draft.
Regardless of the specifics, I decided it would be interesting to see if I could write a web app that would organize the draft, although Google Sheets provides similar functionality for a fraction of the effort. Using Flask, a pretty bare bones web framework for Python, I was able to accomplish this (only about 2 months too late).
Things I learned
Most of all this was a chance to learn Flask and how to build a web app. I essentially started knowing the bare minimum about back-end logic, how to store player information, and how the web page interacts with data on the back-end, but this was a great exercise in learning a bit more about all of these things, even if they aren’t done in the most efficient ways…
My attempt is documented on Github, and I ended up deploying it on Heroku.