Seeking full tennis results in Cincinnati? Get a complete tournament score summary.

Okay, so yesterday I was trying to figure out a good way to track tennis results from the Cincinnati tournament. It started out kinda messy, but I think I got something workable now.

First thing I did was just Google “Cincinnati tennis results”. Duh, right? But seriously, you gotta start somewhere. I landed on a couple of sports news sites, like ESPN and some tennis-specific ones. They had scores, but it was all scattered around, you know?

What I really wanted was something in a table, something I could easily copy and paste or, even better, get as a CSV. So, I started digging around those sites, looking for a “results” or “schedule” page. Found a few, but they were all pretty clunky to use. Lots of ads, pop-ups, that kinda crap.

Then I thought, “Maybe there’s an official tournament site?” Bingo! Found the official Western & Southern Open website. It actually had a decent results section. Not perfect, but way better than the news sites. The problem was that the data was still embedded in the HTML. I couldn’t just download a CSV or anything.

So, I decided to try some web scraping. I’ve messed with that before, so I figured, why not? I fired up Python and used the `requests` library to grab the HTML from the results page. Pretty straightforward.

Next up was parsing the HTML. I used `BeautifulSoup` for that. It’s a lifesaver, honestly. I poked around the HTML structure using the browser’s developer tools (right-click, “Inspect Element”). Figured out which HTML tags contained the match scores and player names.

This part was kinda tedious. I had to write code to find the right `

`s, ``s, and `` tags. It was a lot of “find this tag, then look for this other tag inside it, then grab the text”. But eventually, I got it working. I was able to extract the player names, scores, and round information for each match.

After extracting the data, I stuffed it all into a list of dictionaries. Each dictionary represented a single match, with keys like “player1”, “player2”, “score”, and “round”.

Finally, I used the `csv` library to write the data to a CSV file. Now I had a nice, clean CSV with all the tennis results. I could open it in Excel or import it into a database. Sweet!

It wasn’t super elegant, but it got the job done. I might try to automate it later, so it updates automatically as new results come in. But for now, I’m happy with it.

Here’s kinda what the code looked like, in super-basic terms. I ain’t gonna paste the whole thing, ’cause it’s messy and specific to that website’s HTML, but you get the idea:

• Import libraries: `requests`, `BeautifulSoup`, `csv`
• Get the HTML: `response = *(url)`
• Parse the HTML: `soup = BeautifulSoup(*, ‘*’)`
• Find the match data: Use `*_all()` to locate the relevant HTML elements.
• Extract the data: Loop through the elements and grab the text for player names, scores, etc.
• Store the data: Create a list of dictionaries.
• Write to CSV: Use `*` to write the data to a CSV file.

Next time, maybe I’ll try using a dedicated web scraping framework like Scrapy. That might make it a little cleaner.

Things I Learned:

• Official tournament websites are your friend.
• `BeautifulSoup` is awesome for parsing HTML.
• Web scraping can be kinda tedious, but it’s worth it when you need data in a structured format.

Anyway, that’s how I tracked those tennis results. Hope it helps someone else out there!