Khoury College student designs Northeastern-athlete-themed Wordle
Author: Milton Posner
Date: 05.17.22
It’s hard to reckon with just how quickly Wordle became universal. The game’s extended sphere now encompasses hundreds of different themes and languages.
Northeastern sports, however? Not nearly as universal.
“It is a bit of a niché interest,” said second-year Khoury College of Computer Sciences student and WRBB sportscaster Justin Diament. “We’re not the most sports-inclined school and we don’t have the largest fan base, but that means the people who are involved tend to be extra invested. They carry the support for the teams on their backs.”
The ethos that turns observers into contributors is exemplified in Diament’s new project: Aurardle. Whereas Wordle users triangulate an unknown word through shaded letters, Aurardle users attempt to guess an unknown Northeastern athlete through shaded attributes: sport, position, year, height, and jersey number.
Diament was the best man on campus to design such a game. He had gravitated toward computer science at his pre-engineering high school, and he has always been passionate about sports.
“I’m an unfortunate Jets, Mets, and Knicks fan, and when you are, their history is one of the only things to latch onto,” Diament explained.
When he transitioned to Northeastern, his mother, aware of his passion for sports talk, suggested he check out the student radio station.
“At first I thought, ‘Well, I’ll be on some shows, talk some pro sports,’” Diament recalled. “But game broadcasting, especially for basketball, was far too enticing.”
Diament dove straight in, rising to become WRBB’s lead men’s basketball play-by-play voice in the fall of 2021, adding web and technical director duties shortly thereafter, and being named the incoming sports director in early April.
In February, he created the Northeastern Sports Rabbit Hole, a Twitter page where he showcases nuggets from his deep dives through Northeastern sports history. It’s a way, he said, to satisfy his curiosity and document material that might otherwise remain tucked away on elusive old forums.
Then a new idea emerged. During a back and forth in the WRBB Sports Slack group about MLB- and NBA-themed Wordles, fellow broadcaster Daisy Roberts half-jokingly suggested a Wordle based on Northeastern sports. For the group, it wasn’t a serious notion.
“But then I thought, ‘I could probably make this,’” Diament said. “I figured I’d throw together a little Python script—nothing fancy or good-looking, but people could play it if they wanted.”
A night and a half later, Diament had a functioning game, albeit one that required users to download and run the script themselves.
“I got a lot of good feedback, and I thought, ‘I’ve been looking for a CS project, but haven’t been inspired by anything in particular,’” Diament said. “I figured I could convert it into a real, better-looking website that anyone could access without following lengthy download instructions. Once I started, I had to go through with it.”
By this point, the project needed a name. While WARDle (for Northeastern women’s hockey forward Tessa Ward) was floated, it would mirror the MLB-themed WARdle, named for baseball’s Wins Above Replacement statistic. So Diament named it for Ward’s teammate, three-time Hockey East First Teamer Chloé Aurard (pronounced aw-RAR).
Chloé Aurard attacks the net against Holy Cross. Photo by Sarah Olender.
Next, Aurardle needed the appearance and front-end functionality to make it easy to share and play.
“I was hoping to keep some of the same logic, but I needed the game to run on the front end of the site,” Diament said. “Beyond a well-constructed list of the athletes and their attributes that I’d drawn up, it required a full rewrite.”
The road to these improvements ran through a number of programming languages and front-end development tools—HTML, CSS, JavaScript, Flask, jQuery—that Diament was inexperienced or unfamiliar with. To craft a site that operated smoothly, he learned those concepts on the fly through trial and error.
“It helped to have a whole fleet of WRBB Sports people play and bug test it, to do things you might not think to do when you’re the one setting it up,” Diament added. “It was great to get that feedback and diagnose those issues before sending it out.”
“I was afraid it wouldn’t look up to professional standards,” he continued. “Because if I was going to put this kind of time into it, I wanted it to look nice and play smoothly. I think I achieved that, and I was happy to see everybody enjoy it so much.”
There are still improvements Diament wants to make. For instance, the Aurardle window resets after the user leaves the page; he’d like it to return the user to their results if they visit the page after playing the game that day, as most other Wordle games do. Diament also plans to update the rosters yearly.
He may add new Northeastern teams as well, although he is cautious of making the game too difficult by expanding the athlete pool too far. The game currently includes the teams WRBB covers: baseball, men’s and women’s basketball, and men’s and women’s hockey.
For now though, he’s largely content with his first independent project.
“It’s always great to see people enjoying something that you made,” he said. “To create something that shows off that enjoyment of the teams was fun, and perhaps something to grow the space a little bit—to show that there are people who care about these teams, their success, and their history.”
Disclosure: The author and the subject are friends and former WRBB broadcast partners.