Occidental’s athletics department started utilizing FanWord AI, a leading storytelling AI company, to help recap games and write player bios Aug. 18, 2025.
Director of communications Joe Perrino said the software helps the athletics department prepare for upcoming games, as well as recap away games or weekend games that previously would have fallen through the cracks. According to Perrino, FanWord AI has been extremely helpful, saving him hours of work and allowing him to focus on other areas of importance for the department.
“It helps us sort data and [get] recaps out in a much quicker manner,” Perrino said. “It actually gives me some data – it says that it’s created 192 recaps, 127 player bios and saved 134 hours.”
Perrino said the time FanWord AI has saved him has allowed him to take on more projects of his own.
“I now have time to do this series on the website that highlights things from the previous week, and looks forward to the next week,” Perrino said.
Shanda Ness, director of athletics, said via email that FanWord AI has lightened Perrino’s workload.
“FanWord AI allows [Perrino] to be more efficient with [his] time,” Ness said. “One of the main benefits of FanWord is having the ability to generate game recaps and athletic stories in real time. This has been appreciated by athletics staff, student-athletes and fans.”
Though the service has been well received, Perrino said the department’s implementation of FanWord AI involved some obstacles. According to Perrino, there were discrepancies in FanWord’s earlier work due to the company’s beta-testing features, which interfered with the quality of game write-ups. Perrino said these errors required more work on his part to correct and humanize.
“I like to write in a very specific way,” Perrino said. “I wrote for my college newspaper […] so I’m particular about those things. I [changed] some words that I prefer to use.”
Perrino said there were sport-to-sport discrepancies in the quality of the work, which he said could be related to how much background information FanWord AI has about each sport. Perrino said FanWord has more information about sports that were first introduced to the AI.
“It writes differently for different sports,” Perrino said. “It writes basketball a little better than it would write soccer [….] I think [FanWord’s writing on] some of their older sports are a bit more advanced than the newer sports that they’ve been working on.”
Baseball head coach Luke Wetmore said some of the write-ups FanWord had completed earlier in the school year had something off about their character that didn’t quite fit into the world of baseball.
“I [was] reading a write-up, and it wasn’t written […] in the context of baseball,” Wetmore said. “It’s so glaringly obvious as someone who’s been around the game for 30 plus years.”
Since then, Wetmore said the initial quirks of the system have been worked out, and FanWord content has been able to substantially help the department.
“I haven’t noticed [discrepancies] in the most recent write-ups,” Wetmore said. “It sounds like Joe has been able to make the write-ups read the way [they] should for our individual sports. It’s a very useful tool to supplement the human aspect of the game [….] the things behind the numbers, behind the data.”
Contact Chloe Kummerer at kummerer@oxy.edu
