Chris Hammond How to create a scouting portal for your youth hockey team
Introducing the Scouting Portal repository — a project designed to organize, track, and share youth hockey scouting information in a structured, reusable way.
The 12U A1 Scouting Portal repository was built to solve a challenge: how do you consistently track youth hockey scouting data — teams, tournaments, stats, coaches, and rankings — in a way that is easy to maintain, share, and evolve? Instead of scattered notes or one-off spreadsheets, this project puts everything into a structured portal backed by version control.
See it in Action
No clue what I’m talking about? Check out the live portal for the 2025-26 Chesterfield Falcons 12U A1 team. There you will find a list of the currently known tournaments, opponents, and links to the various resources for the team and opponents.
What Can Coaches and Parents Do With It?
If you’re coaching, managing, or even just supporting a youth hockey team, the portal helps by:
- Providing a single source of info for league, tournaments and opponents from both.
- Quickly generating scouting reports before tournaments.
- Centralizing info like team websites, MyHockeyRankings links, and records.
- Tracking rankings over time for league opponents.
- Making it easier to spot trends across multiple opponents.
- Keeping everyone on the same page with a single source of truth.
No more digging through endless email threads or half-updated spreadsheets or spending hours on google trying to find opponents info — the portal puts it all in one place.
What’s the Purpose?
The goal is simple: create a repeatable system where tournaments/opponents can be logged and updated in one place. The portal repository provides:
- A central scouting database that anyone on the team can contribute to.
- Clean organization of team info, tournament schedules, and rankings.
- A way to generate scouting reports and HTML pages automatically from data in CSV/Markdown files.
Rather than siloed knowledge, the repo ensures scouting data is stored in a structured format for the year. In the future it might be tweaked and updated to handle information archiving for previous years.
Why a Repository?
Hockey schedules and opponent info change constantly. By using GitHub as the backbone:
- You get version history, so old data isn’t lost when updates happen.
- Anyone with access can contribute via pull requests.
- Automation scripts can pull fresh data, build reports, and publish them directly to the web.
- It keeps the project transparent and extensible — easy to tweak as the team’s needs evolve.
In short, this isn’t just a one-season tool. It’s designed to grow with the program.
What’s Next?
The repository is only the beginning. As the project develops, expect more features like:
- Automated scraping of opponent data.
- Direct HTML report generation using templates.
By keeping the project open and versioned, we’re setting the stage for a reusable scouting framework that can help not just this year’s 12U A1 team, but future teams as well.
Curious about using or contributing to the portal? Check out the repository, try it out, and share your ideas.
