Here’s the sad truth about sports scoring apps: most aren’t that interested in actually telling the score.
After all, where is the money to provide this kind of simple information? The modern sports scoring app needs to do more. It has to bombard you with banner ads and bets, beg you to create an account and sign up for notifications, sell you a few tickets and show you a few videos to keep engagement high. The scores themselves are an afterthought.
Fortunately, there is an alternative that tells you the outcomes of every major sporting event without distraction.
And the same kinds of resources are available to add minimalist magic to your news, weather, and even navigation, if you know where to look.
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Useful info, without the filler
To get started, for an easier way to look up sports scores, visit PlainTextSports.com in any web browser.
➜ Plain Text Sports is a website that displays sports scores using only letters, numbers and characters.
⌚ The site loads almost instantly and scanning the scores takes time a few quick seconds.
It’s also free: without ads, logins or subscriptions.
The Plain Text Sports interface really is as clear as it gets.
After using an app like ESPN or TheScore, the bare-bones look of Plain Text Sports may take some getting used to, but you’ll quickly realize how much information is packed into the homepage. For each competition you can click through to the schedule, standings and team pages. Clicking on a game will reveal detailed statistics and play-by-play details.
Since this is a website, each league, team, and rankings page also has its own URL. That means you can easily bookmark the things you care about and skip the standard home screen.
There’s also a handy dark mode switch at the top of the page.
You see all relevant information without the usual distractions.
Although Plain Text Sports doesn’t have a dedicated mobile app, you can always add the site as a home screen icon. The site even offers one page with instructions for iOS and Android.
The only notable downside to Plain Text Sports is its lack of highlight videos. That would clearly go against the ethos of the site, but if it could find a way to link to the latest clips from a site like ESPN or YouTube, it would be virtually unbeatable.
More plain text resources
Once you start receiving your sports scores this way, you might become addicted to the plain text lifestyle. Here are some other resources that convey information in a similar way:
- 68k.news: Plain text headings.
- 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, shown in ASCII symbols. (Refine the prediction with these URL changes.)
- gdir.web.net: Text-based Google Maps directions, the way they used to be.
Suffice it to say, this isn’t your average weather website.
It doesn’t get much simpler than that.
- Sports in plain text is a website that works in any browser (just like all the other resources mentioned above).
- It’s free to access, with no ads, subscriptions or usage limits. (The same is largely true of the other sites as well, although some do have ads.)
- The site does not track your individual usage and does not require any form of personal information.
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