Automated Context Through Trends for Game Recaps
January 20, 2026
If you’re a college sports communicator in 2026, you’ve probably felt it:
More content. More platforms. More expectations.
But never more time.
For most communicators, writing game recaps full of context is a time-consuming process: scanning box scores for patterns and trying to remember whether a milestone is the first of the season or the first of their career — important, yet labor-intensive work.
Today, we’re excited to help change that.
In 2025, we brought speed and scalability to the game recap process for more communicators than ever before.
In 2026, we’re taking AI-powered game recaps to the next level.
Meet Trends — Automated Season and Career Insights for Game Recaps
Trends is our newest feature inside FanWord Assist, designed to help college sports communicators surface more accurate and engaging storylines—instantly.
For SIDs who need to produce game notes and recaps faster than ever, Trends eliminates the grind of manual research by automatically detecting storylines from past performances.
Trends automatically scans previous game files for context and identifies the following trends/facts at both a team- and player-specific level:
- Season- and career-bests
- Streaks and patterns
- First occurrences
- Statistical anomalies
These insights can then be added directly to your game notes and recap drafts – all with a single click – helping create richer, more accurate, data-backed content in seconds.
Why We Built It
Over the last year, we’ve talked with hundreds of athletic departments and thousands of college sports communicators about their process of writing recaps.
One thing we heard over and over was how time-consuming it was to dig through statistics, game notes, and historical data to enrich the recaps.
So, we decided to do something about it.
Trends puts deep research into the hands of every SID without endless and repetitive detective work.
How It Works
1. Open your game inside FanWord Assist
After selecting the ‘Teams’ section in the sidebar and choosing your sport, select the game you’d like to generate a recap for by clicking ‘View Game’ in the games overview table.
2. Generate proposed insights
You’ll find Trends in ‘Step 4: Additional Info’ when producing a recap.
Trends will run an analysis of your game’s XML file against previous team and player data, so when your team has previous game data to pull from, you’ll see two sections inside ‘Step 4: Additional Info’:
- Team Trend Analysis: These trends are specific to your program at the seasonal and historical levels.
- Player Trend Analysis: These trends are specific to players on your team at the seasonal and historical levels.
To generate trends for either section, simply click the ‘Analyze Trends’ button.
3. Check the boxes you want to include
It’s your choice – include the trends you want for the game recap and ignore the rest. Selected boxes automatically populate above in the Game Notes section and are editable.
4. Review and edit your trends
Once selected, Trends will populate above as individual game facts. From here, you can edit individual trends, delete them entirely, or add something new.
When finished, you can proceed by pressing the ‘Save’ button at the bottom of the section.
5. A completed recap with big-picture context
Once completed, selected trends flow directly into your game recap format. You’ll see them in your draft after clicking the ‘Generate’ button in ‘Step 5: Draft’. In the recap edit box, you can always edit your trends and how they display before marking the draft complete.
That’s it. Your game recaps now have as much context as you desire, allowing fans to go deeper than ever before – without any more research on your plate.
See the full process in action:
Customization for Power Users
We know every sport and every SID has their own preferences.
Trends includes a dedicated menu within the Teams section, where you can click to hide unwanted trend types. Then, these team and player trends won’t populate when making a game recap. You’re always in full control.
Available Now for XML-Supported Sports
Your teams and athletes deserve great stories. SIDs deserve tools that make that easier. Trends is a major step toward both.
Trends is currently supported by all sports with XML-based data files. If you’d like a walkthrough or want to see how Trends fits into your department’s workflow, schedule a demo anytime.
