wehoop • Data and Tools for Women's Basketball • wehoop

wehoop

The goal of wehoop is to provide tools for working with women’s college and professional basketball data. It exports 754 functions: live wrappers for ESPN, the WNBA Stats API, the NCAA, Fox Sports, Basketball-Reference, Her Hoop Stats, Bart Torvik, official.nba.com and eight international data providers, plus 102 load_*() functions that read pre-built season files (play-by-play, box scores, rosters, schedules, crosswalks and model outputs) instead of calling the sources.

Data status

The load_*() functions read release assets on sportsdataverse-data. The badges below are rebuilt nightly from each producer’s latest workflow run and newest release files; idle means the sport is out of season. Full detail: sportsdataverse.org/status.

Dataset	Data updated	Through	Pipeline	Update workflows
Women’s college basketball (ESPN)
Women’s college basketball (stats.ncaa.org)
WNBA (ESPN)
WNBA Stats API
Conference, division and ballpark reference				—

Installation

You can install the CRAN version of wehoop with:

install.packages("wehoop")

You can install the latest build from R-universe with:

install.packages("wehoop", repos = c("https://sportsdataverse.r-universe.dev", getOption("repos")))

This documentation describes wehoop 3.1.0. If the CRAN release hasn’t caught up yet, install the development version from GitHub instead:

if (!requireNamespace("pak", quietly = TRUE)) install.packages("pak")
pak::pak("sportsdataverse/wehoop")
# or, with remotes:
# if (!requireNamespace("remotes", quietly = TRUE)) install.packages("remotes")
# remotes::install_github("sportsdataverse/wehoop")

Quick start

WNBA play-by-play for a season

load_wnba_pbp() covers 2002-2026; pass several seasons (or seasons = TRUE for all of them) to load more at once.

wnba_pbp <- wehoop::load_wnba_pbp(seasons = 2026)

## 144409 rows of WNBA play-by-play data from 354 games.

Women’s college basketball play-by-play for a season

load_wbb_pbp() covers 2004 onward. A new season’s file is published once its games begin.

wbb_pbp <- wehoop::load_wbb_pbp(seasons = 2026)

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

What’s in wehoop

Each family links to its section of the function reference.

ESPN (espn_wnba_*, espn_wbb_*): 180 wrappers (88 women’s college + 92 WNBA) for play-by-play, box scores, schedules, standings, teams, athletes, odds, win probability, the draft and transactions. The ESPN endpoints article walks through them.
WNBA Stats API (wnba_*): stats.wnba.com box scores, play-by-play, league dashboards, player and team splits, shot charts and lineups.
WNBA officiating (wnba_referee_assignments()): official.nba.com’s daily referee assignments.
NCAA (ncaa_wbb_*): NCAA team lists and NET rankings.
Fox Sports (fox_wnba_*, fox_wbb_*): play-by-play, box scores, odds, rosters, standings and leaders.
Basketball-Reference (bref_wnba_*): WNBA player stats, team stats and standings.
Her Hoop Stats (hhs_*): NCAA women’s team indexes, team stats and rosters, for subscribers.
Bart Torvik (bart_wbb_*): women’s college team ratings and game schedules.
Crosswalks (WNBA, WBB): team, player and game ids matched across ESPN, WNBA Stats, Fox and Torvik, built live (wnba_*_crosswalk(), wbb_*_crosswalk()) or loaded pre-built (load_*_crosswalk()).
International (reference): FIBA (fiba_*), Genius Sports (genius_*), Sportradar Atrium (atrium_*), NBL / WNBL (nbl_*), SCB / DBBL (scb_*), FEB (feb_*), TBF (tbf_*) and the W League (wjbl_*), plus per-competition aliases such as fiba_wwc_*, wbbl_* and lfb_*. 289 functions in all.
Release loaders (WNBA, WBB, WNBA Stats, NCAA engine, models, conference groups): see below.

Bulk datasets

The 102 load_*() functions read pre-built season files (rds or parquet) from the sportsdataverse-data releases instead of calling the source APIs. Most take seasons and return a wehoop_data tibble (load_wnba_draft_manifest() takes no arguments and the load_*_groups() lineage tables are not split by season); most can also write to a database through dbConnection and tablename.

ESPN-backed (load_wnba_*, load_wbb_*): play-by-play, player and team box scores, schedules, rosters, player and team season stats, standings, shots, game rosters, officials, player cores and the WNBA draft.
WNBA Stats API (load_wnba_stats_*): play-by-play, schedules, rosters, coaches, player game logs, the league dashboard cube (load_wnba_stats_leaguedash()), draft, shots, game rosters, officials and possessions (load_wnba_stats_possessions()).
NCAA play-by-play engine (load_ncaa_wbb_*, 13 loaders): play-by-play, shots, lineups, matchup stints, possessions, RAPM (within-team and league-wide), box scores, rosters, schedules and team ids, built by sportsdataverse-py from stats.ncaa.org.
Crosswalks (load_wnba_*_crosswalk(), load_wbb_*_crosswalk()): the pre-built team, player and schedule crosswalks.
Models: load_wnba_player_impact(), load_wbb_player_value() and load_wbb_ratings().
Conference and division groups: load_wnba_groups(), load_wbb_groups() and their _group_seasons(), _group_aliases() and _team_group_seasons() companions record membership as it was each season.

Documentation

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

There is also a printable wehoop cheat sheet (PDF), one of a set covering every SportsDataverse package.

The Getting started article is the place to begin; the WNBA and women’s college cookbooks have worked recipes.

Breaking Changes

Full News on Releases

Companion packages

sdvplotR (0.3.0, pak::pak("sportsdataverse/sdvplotR")) adds team logos and colours to ggplot2 charts and draws shot charts from the wehoop shot loaders; see its WNBA, women’s college and shot chart articles.
sportyR (2.4.5, install.packages("sportyR")) draws WNBA, NCAA and FIBA courts to plot shot locations on.
hoopR is the men’s basketball companion (NBA and men’s college basketball).
sportsdataverse-py is the Python package; most wehoop functions have a Python twin of the same name.

The SportsDataverse

wehoop is part of the SportsDataverse, a set of open-source packages for sports data.

Package	Sport / Scope
cfbfastR	College football
hoopR	Men’s basketball (NBA and NCAA)
wehoop	Women’s basketball (WNBA and NCAA)
fastRhockey	Hockey (NHL and PWHL)
baseballr	Baseball (MLB, MiLB, NCAA)
softballR	College softball
oddsapiR	Sports betting odds
recruitR	College football recruiting
usfootballR	US soccer
cfbseedR · cfb4th	CFB playoff simulation · fourth-down decisions
cfbplotR · sdvplotR · sportyR	Logos, colors, tables · playing surfaces
sportsdataverse-R	Umbrella R metapackage
sportsdataverse-py · sportsdataverse.js	Python and Node.js

See the full ecosystem at sportsdataverse.org.

Follow the SportsDataverse on X and star this repo

Our Authors

Saiem Gilani

Geoff Hutchinson - RIP

Cheat sheet

A printable one-page reference for wehoop — the function families, the loaders, and what each one returns.

📄 Download the wehoop cheat sheet (PDF)

Free to download, print and hand out; light and dark, US Letter landscape. Every SportsDataverse package has one — browse them all at sportsdataverse.org/cheatsheets.

Code of Conduct

Please note that the wehoop project is released with a Contributor Code of Conduct. By contributing to this project, you agree to abide by its terms.

Citations

To cite the wehoop R package in publications, use:

BibTeX Citation

@misc{hutchinson_gilani_2021_wehoop,
  title = {wehoop: The SportsDataverse's R Package for Women's Basketball Data.},
  url = {https://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 = {2026}
}

License

wehoop is released under the MIT License (MIT + file LICENSE); see LICENSE.md.