A Community That Couldn't Miss Games
South Bossier, Louisiana is a tight-knit community of around 30,000 people on the outskirts of Shreveport. Parkway High School football isn't just entertainment there—it's how the town marks time. But it's also a military community, and at any given point, some of the parents in the bleachers have family watching from overseas.
Wes, a technology sales executive who grew up in South Bossier, started thinking about this in 2022 when someone at a game asked him to go live on Facebook. He held up his phone and pressed "Go Live" from the stands.
"We're a big military community. There's a big military base here locally. And at any given year, one or two parents are deployed or they got family that's spread out all over. So we have a lot of people watching these games from all over the world."
That impromptu Facebook Live became sobo.live—a fully volunteer-run broadcast operation that now streams high school football and basketball games to 500–2,000 concurrent viewers per game, entirely self-funded through local advertising.
The Problem with the First Score Bug
Wes had no broadcasting background. He learned what an overlay was, figured out how OBS worked, and tried four or five different scoreboard solutions over the first year. The experience was not good.
The one he paid for—FlexyScore—had a timer that broke constantly:
"It used a really weird HTML timer function that always malfunctioned. It never stopped and started correctly, and it would reset all the time."
At one point the timer was so unreliable that Wes aimed a camera at the stadium's physical scoreboard and cropped the timer into his stream. "I thought that always looked hinky. I never really liked that."
Beyond the timer, FlexyScore required web development skills to customize and was built for European soccer—not American football and basketball. Despite paying for an annual subscription, Wes kept looking.
700 Viewers for a Game With No Video
The break came in February 2024 when Parkway High School made the Louisiana state basketball championship. There was a problem: NFHS Network held exclusive video rights. Wes could broadcast audio and graphics—nothing else.
He started searching for a better scoreboard option two days before the game and found KeepTheScore.
"I probably found it and had it all set up two days before the championship game. And I knew, I was like, 'Okay, we're going to use this forever. This is awesome. This is way better.'"
The audio-only broadcast—just commentary over a full-screen basketball scoreboard—became the highest-viewed production they'd ever done: 700 concurrent viewers. No video. Just talking and a scoreboard.
Sobo.live's first use of KeepTheScore for the championship broadcast.
"Everyone liked the big interface," Wes says. "And I thought it was interesting that nobody was complaining about there's no video and for $10 they could watch it somewhere else."
What an Eight-Person Volunteer Broadcast Looks Like
Football games now run with eight people:
- Three camera operators (students from the school)
- Two sportscasters (local real estate agents who turned out to be great on air)
- One spotter relaying player names and numbers to the announcers
- One scorekeeper on the KeepTheScore admin panel
- Wes producing—managing cameras, overlays, and OBS
Setting up outside a cramped press box at an away game.
The entire production packs into three bags. One wired Canon XA11 camcorder, a couple of Samsung Galaxy phones running NDI wireless streaming, monitors for the sportscasters. High-end phones replaced most of the expensive camera gear:
"You get a really good mobile camera out of these high-end cell phones versus some of these 4K camcorders—you can spend two or three times as much as a phone, but you get half of the utility."
In 2025, Sobo.live partnered with the school to give seniors in the student news program real-world broadcast experience.
Wes built a custom graphic shell in OBS that wraps around the KeepTheScore scoreboard: team logos, school colors, animation zones for ads, and the built-in scoring flourishes (the "+3" burst when someone hits a three-pointer). Advertisers get animated spots that trigger on scoring plays.
Sobo.live's football scorebug.
"I have different onscreen graphics already. For example, for one sport, it almost looks like a sign and then the score bug fits inside of it. And on the outside of the sign, that's where the ads will go or we do player pop-ups."
Who's Watching and Why It Matters
Football games pull 500–2,000 concurrent viewers depending on how close the game is. Basketball sits at 100–300. The championship audio broadcast hit 700.
The sportscasters read comments live on air. Viewers respond.
"They'll ask, 'Where's everybody watching from?' And over the years, you recognize a lot of the commenters. A lot of people are like, 'Hey, I'm with the grandkids on vacation. We're in Colorado.' Or, 'I'm actually in Germany.' We've had a guy stationed in Japan watching their kids."
In one game, the team raised $3,500 for the school's athletic program using an on-screen fundraising thermometer during the broadcast.
The operation covers its costs entirely through local advertising—5–6 year-round sponsors and 5–10 one-off advertisers per game. Whatever's left over goes back to the school.
"All of us that are involved in this, we all have pretty good full-time gigs. So it is a lot of passion. We donate back to the school. They really like that. And that's another reason that they probably let us do stuff."
What Made the Scoreboard Non-Negotiable
Wes isn't precious about most of his gear. He'll use whatever camera phone gets the job done. But the scoreboard has to be right.
Timer failures aren't recoverable during a live game. A scoreboard that resets mid-play makes everything look amateurish—which matters because professional appearance is how Wes gets permission at away venues.
"Nobody's ever told us no. Most of them when we ask, they go out of their way. They set us up in the press box, they ask what we need, they'll run cables for us."
That access is earned:
"I've tricked a lot of people into thinking we're a professional organization by the way our scoreboard looks."
Two days from discovery to championship broadcast. That's how fast the switch happened. For a volunteer operation that can't afford downtime, that kind of reliability is the whole story.
Ready to start broadcasting your community's sports? Get started with KeepTheScore and bring professional-quality scoreboards to your live streams.
