ICE HOCKEY

How does the SHSHL continually lose archived data?

All records pre-2023 are gone.

By: SHSHL News
STAFF WRITER

Back in the day, specifically in the eighties and nineties, player stats and league standings were managed on paper with a pen or pencil, and then a typewriter to make it official. A league official typically the secretary collected all of the game sheets and kept meticulous records in stapled packets. At the end of the season, all of the documentation was archived by the league's commissioners. The LBCSHL, (Lower Bucks County Scholastic Hockey League) was probably the best at record keeping. Commissioner, Paul Saylor had it down to a science, so much so that his league would provide yearbooks to every player at season's end. Andy Richards, (SHSHL Commissioner) was a close second as he kept boxes of documentation in storage going back years, all of this well before the inception of computer documentation, and managed websites that document and archive the statistical data electronically.

Enter 2001, all of the high school ice hockey leagues around the Delaware Valley adopted the use of computers to manage all facets of league documentation online. The teams, their rosters, schedules, stats, and standings were all readily available with a mouse click. Although previous years' data was still available on paper, it was still accessible if need be.

The various league management boards have changed many times over the last four decades, and decisions on how to manage the past data have been handled differently by each board as well. The LBCSHL has been long gone since the mid-2000s as its remaining teams were absorbed by either the SHSHL or the ICSHL. And with that, the documentation wound up getting lost in the shuffle, at least for the SHSHL it did. The ICSHL seems to have most if not all of its past archives while the SHSHL continues to lose its archives over and over with no idea how to get them back. There is a website called "Wayback Machine" better known as "The Internet Archive" which archives all websites on the net with the use of data scrapes. However, it's only as good as the upkeep by the league officials who manage their sites. For whatever reason it seems the SHSHL league officials choose to delete the past when they renew or change their accounts with various website providers. The SHSHL kept pretty good track of their archives from 2014 up until last season but whatever changed this past offseason with their provider, they lost everything again. All individual past player stats and team records are gone, again, and none of which is accessible via the Internet Archive. In this day and age of digital documentation, and online storage, why do they not have access to this information readily available on their site after making changes, and how is it possible they continue to lose it over and over again?

Back in late July, I noticed the SHSHL website was a mess and I reached out to the league to find out if archived records would be added back for all of the years before 2023 dating back to 2014. I was informed, maybe, but it appears that maybe actually meant no.