Occidental’s athletics department announced on their website its partnership with FanWord, an AI storytelling company increasing in popularity throughout college sports Aug. 18. On FanWord’s website, they said they aim to help “small college athletics create top-tier content quickly.”
Shanda Ness, director of athletics, said FanWord assists in creating more material to celebrate Occidental athletes.
“Our top priority is to ensure we are celebrating our student-athletes and sharing their stories,” Ness said via email. “FanWord allows us to be more efficient in our process so we can highlight more moments, teams and individuals across Oxy athletics.”
Joe Perrino, assistant athletic director for communications, joined Occidental in Fall 2024 after two years as the assistant sports information director at Chapman University, his alma mater. According to Perrino, before the FanWord partnership, the two-person communications team of himself and his assistant was solely responsible for writing all stories on the athletics website.
Perrino said that FanWord’s technology has allowed the communications team to effectively cover more events and teams.
“I’m able to cover more events, which is awesome,” Perrino said. “It gives us a better reach across all of our athletics and hopefully it’ll be a nice tool for storytelling.”
Perrino said FanWord has helped him save time on athlete features that usually take one to two weeks which he only had time to do over the summer.
“With FanWord I can do [a feature] within the same day,” Perrino said. “Now I can talk about a women’s soccer player during their season.”
According to Anahit Aladzhanyan, associate athletic director for budget & finance and women’s basketball coach, the funds for FanWord came from profit the athletics department made with FloSports, a live sports event streaming service.
“[FloSports] has fees associated with it, and those fees then get divvied up amongst the conference schools, so we received some of that revenue,” Aladzhanyan said. “That revenue has made it possible for us to invest into our communications department and our games management department.”
Diego Ramirez ’22, assistant athletic director for communications, graduated from Occidental as a member of the baseball team and as an employee of games management.
Ramirez said FanWord has made reporting more efficient in terms of sharing more stories about athletes. He also said the athletics department has never covered away games, but this year they are able to for the first time.
“We did not write stories for road games because we weren’t there, so we would just be regurgitating the stats,” Ramirez said. “Now with FanWord, we started incorporating stories for those games. I would guess [we’ll create] maybe a difference of like five more pieces [a week] this year.”
According to Ramirez, FanWord’s setup still allows for staff involvement in the writing process before publishing.
“FanWord takes the stats from the game and has a bunch of options about how you want the story to be written,” Ramirez said. “It gives us a draft of a story and we […] add some flair to it […] We’ll take it with our edits, and post it to Oxy athletics.”
Aladzhanyan said as the women’s basketball coach she is excited about the attention this increase in media will bring to Oxy athletics.
“I think we all want our student-athletes’ wonderful stories and their accomplishments to be shared as much as possible,” Aladzhanyan said. “Also, our recruits want to know what’s happening within our programs.”
According to Aladzhanyan, since the platform is new to the department, there is no available data yet on how FanWord productions have altered fan engagement. Aladzhanyan said that FanWord has created more opportunities for the athletics department.
“We’re pretty understaffed; we’re not taking anyone’s job away by any means,” Aladzhanyan said. “We have finite resources and [FanWord] is feasible for us, whereas hiring another full-time person is not. It just makes sense.”
Contact Lucinda Toft at ltoft@oxy.edu
