January 05, 2026
Information technology students collaborated with Mizzou Athletics and the Missouri School of Journalism to build a new website that supports the needs of fans and journalists.
Mizzou Engineering invests in hands-on learning experiences. Senior capstone projects are just one way we prepare students for their future careers and advance solutions to real-world issues. These group projects encourage innovation, creative problem solving and collaboration.
Here’s how a team of information technology students built a new, user-friendly statistics website for Mizzou Athletics.
Team
Dane Bishop, Alexander Coker, Sarah Greenwood, Mel Nezirovic, Gage Smith
Challenge
Mizzou’s athletics statistics site had a lot of unused potential. It was easier to go to ESPN or Google Sports than to find stats on MUTigers.com. Every sport used a different format, information was buried behind several menus, and journalists told us it was not really built for the work they do.
Our goal was to build a cleaner, more consistent, data-focused website that made life easier for fans and sports writers. We wanted something you could navigate quickly, something accurate and something Mizzou could be proud of.
Process
We started by finding out what people wanted. A Columbia Missourian sports editor showed us what makes a stats site usable. Mizzou Athletics walked us through how they collect and update stats sport-by-sport, spreadsheet-by-spreadsheet.
We got the server running, bought a domain, designed the page layouts and used a scrum process to break everything into weekly goals.
Dane Bishop led the effort to scrape live sports data. Gage Smith helped initialize the servers and deploy everything. Alexander Coker made sure we were meeting the needs of Athletics and the Missouri School of Journalism. Mel Nezirovic ensured the website was Mizzou brand compliant. And Sarah Greenwood built the bulk of the website’s front end design. We all contributed to coding and design.
Results
Our working website automatically pulls live data every time a page is loaded, with no manual updating required. Journalists who tested it said they can now find stats in half the time.
We have plans to add live game animations, radio features, video features and more sports. It’s a basic site right now compared to big platforms, but it proves that the entire process can be automated and streamlined.
Lessons learned
Even a simple-looking feature can take a ton of backend work to get right. Something like a dropdown filter or a sortable table might look easy, but making sure it works with live scraping, multiple sports, different stat formats and user accounts is a huge challenge.
We also learned how to work as a real IT team. We had five people plus mentors, Athletics and Journalism. We had to manage expectations, communicate constantly and explain technical limitations to people who aren’t in IT. Honestly, that taught us as much as the coding did.
Preparation
Everything we’ve learned over the last few years came together for this project: Kristofferson Culmer’s database design; Scottie Murrell’s backend programming; Chip Gubera and Michael Tompkins’ UI/UX work; Dr. Jiaming Jiang’s Python and scripting; Dr. Fang Wang’s project management and structure … Nearly every professor helped us in some way.
Conclusion
This project was really fun, especially because it involved collaboration between the Department of Engineering and Information Technology, Journalism and Athletics. Everyone on the team had an essential skill, and the feedback on our early prototype helped us fix things fast.
We set out to clean up Mizzou’s stats for a couple of sports, and we ended up with a brand-new site that people are genuinely excited about.