With the Olympics starting in Paris on July 26, you might be getting around to familiarizing yourself with members of the United States team. There’s lots of information on the official and dizzying Olympics website, but if there’s a list of team rosters, it’s not easy to find.
Babson College juniors Daniel Liao and Bobby Grogan have built a website that makes it simple to learn about the U.S. team rosters and the individuals on them. The goal, Liao says: “Make it easier for people to get engaged with the Olympics.” The information is sourced from the Olympics organization and Team USA.
They’ve organized sports into categories like “combat” and “ball,” and allow searching by sport and event.
Liao and Grogan live in a housing community on campus called CODE that’s focused on tech-related entrepreneurship. They built the site using HTML, JS, and CSS, with help from a framework called Svelte. They’re renting servers from the Google Cloud Platform to host the website, which works on desktops/laptops/mobile devices.
It took about two weeks to build the site, which is an ongoing project.
“Our biggest challenge is getting the data, which involves manually looking at qualifier results and searching up individual athletes. As you can imagine, this is pretty time consuming,” says Liao, who adds that they are looking to add more info, such as event schedules. They’d like to expand the site to include teams from other countries, but it’s a matter of finding a way to do it more efficiently. After all, the games are beginning…
Liao says he’s especially interested in the sports of climbing and golf (“I’ve been playing golf since I was young and recently picked up bouldering.”) Grogan is following sailing, a sport he’s been involved in since he was young.
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