Here’s the sad truth about sports score apps: Most of them aren’t all that interested in actually telling you the score.
After all, where’s the money in providing straightforward information like that? The modern sports score app has to do more. It must bombard you with banner ads and betting odds, implore you to create an account and opt into notifications, sell you some tickets, and show some videos to keep engagement up. The scores themselves are an afterthought.
Fortunately, there’s an alternative that tells you the outcomes of every major sporting event without distractions.
And the same sort of resources are available to bring minimalist magic to your news, weather, and even navigation, too—if you know where to look.
This tip originally appeared in the free Cool Tools newsletter from The Intelligence. Get the next issue in your inbox and get ready to discover all sorts of awesome tech treasures!
Useful info, without the filler
First things first: For a simpler way to look up sports scores, just head to PlainTextSports.com in any web browser.
➜ Plain Text Sports is a website that lists out sports scores using only letters, numbers, and characters.
⌚ The site loads pretty much instantly, and scanning the scores takes a few fast seconds.
It’s free, too—with no ads, logins, or subscriptions.
After using an app like ESPN or TheScore, Plain Text Sports’ bare-bones appearance can take some getting used to—but you’ll quickly realize how much information is packed onto the homepage. For each league, you can click through to the schedule, standings, and team pages. Clicking on a game brings up detailed statistics and play-by-play details.
Because this is a website, each league, team, and standings page also has its own URL. That means you can easily bookmark the ones you care about and skip the default home screen.
There’s also a handy dark mode toggle at the top of the page.
While Plain Text Sports does not have a dedicated mobile app, you can always add the site as a home screen icon. The site even provides a page with instructions for iOS and Android.
The only notable downside with Plain Text Sports is its lack of highlight videos. Those would obviously be against the site’s ethos, but if it could find a way to link to the latest clips from a site like ESPN or YouTube, it’d be pretty much unbeatable.
More plain-text resources
Once you start getting your sports scores this way, you may find yourself hooked on the plain-text lifestyle. Here are some other resources that convey information in a similar way:
- 68k.news: Headlines in plain text.
- text.npr.org: NPR’s list of headlines, which lead to text-only versions of each article.
- lite.cnn.com: Similar to the above, but for CNN.
- wttr.in: Your local weather forecast, rendered in ASCII symbols. (Fine-tune the forecast with these URL modifications.)
- gdir.telae.net: Text-based Google Maps directions, the way they used to be.
It doesn’t get much simpler than that.
- Plain Text Sports is a website that works in any browser (as are all the other resources mentioned above).
- It’s free to access, with no ads, subscriptions, or usage limits. (The same is mostly true for the other sites, too, though some do have ads.)
- The site doesn’t track your individual usage or require any sort of personal data.
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