wehoop is an R package for working with women’s college and professional basketball data. The package has functions to access live play by play and box score data from ESPN with shot locations when available.

A scraping and aggregating interface for ESPN’s women’s college basketball and WNBA statistics. It provides users with the capability to access the API’s game play-by-plays, box scores, standings and results to analyze the data for themselves.

Installation

You can install the CRAN version of wehoop with:

install.packages("wehoop")

You can install the released version of wehoop from GitHub with:

# You can install using the pak package using the following code:
if (!requireNamespace('pak', quietly = TRUE)){
  install.packages('pak')
}
pak::pak("sportsdataverse/wehoop")

Quick Start

WNBA full play-by-play seasons (2002-2026) ~ 1-2 minutes

tictoc::tic()
progressr::with_progress({
  wnba_pbp <- wehoop::load_wnba_pbp()
})

## Warning in readRDS(con): cannot open URL
## 'https://github.com/sportsdataverse/sportsdataverse-data/releases/download/espn_wnba_pbp/play_by_play_2026.rds':
## HTTP status was '404 Not Found'

## Warning: Failed to readRDS from
## <https://github.com/sportsdataverse/sportsdataverse-data/releases/download/espn_wnba_pbp/play_by_play_2026.rds>

tictoc::toc()

## 0.3 sec elapsed

## Warning: Unknown or uninitialised column: `game_id`.

## 0 rows of WNBA play-by-play data from 0 games.

Women’s college basketball full play-by-play seasons (2004-2026) ~ 2-3 minutes

tictoc::tic()
progressr::with_progress({
  wbb_pbp <- wehoop::load_wbb_pbp()
})
tictoc::toc()

## 10.58 sec elapsed

## 2824090 rows of women's college basketball play-by-play data from 6011 games.

Documentation

For more information on the package and function reference, please see the wehoop documentation website.

wehoop 3.0.0 ships 80 ESPN basketball endpoint wrappers (39 espn_wbb_* + 41 espn_wnba_*) covering reference and catalog data, team detail, athlete coverage, event-level enrichments (odds, win probability, officials, broadcasts), WNBA-only artifacts (draft, free agents, transactions), and league-wide catalogs. See the ESPN basketball endpoints vignette for a full walkthrough.

Breaking Changes

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Our Authors

Saiem Gilani

Geoff Hutchinson - RIP

Citations

To cite the wehoop R package in publications, use:

BibTex Citation

@misc{hutchinson_gilani_2021_wehoop,
  title = {wehoop: Access Women’s Basketball Play by Play Data},
  url = {http://doi.org/10.32614/CRAN.package.wehoop},
  DOI = {10.32614/cran.package.wehoop},
  journal = {CRAN: Contributed Packages},
  publisher = {The R Foundation},
  author = {Gilani,  Saiem and Hutchinson,  Geoffery},
  year = {2021},
  month = nov
}