Sports Data

Posts on the sports-data corner of the workshop — MCP servers, RPI calculators, and reverse-engineered upstreams for NWSL, ECNL, and other soccer data sources. The shape most of these take: no official public API, so build the API, then hand it to Claude via MCP. Currently focused on women’s professional soccer (NWSL) and the youth club-soccer pipeline (ECNL).

The NCAA women's soccer RPI formula, reverse-engineered from the rankings

I implemented the published RPI formula and the rankings didn’t match NCAA’s. A grid search against their published top-25 shows the actual weights are different — opponents’ records weigh more, the location bonus is milder, and opponents’ records enter the formula without any location adjustment.

How the NCAA women's soccer RPI actually works — and why teams pick their opponents carefully

A plain-English walkthrough of the Rating Percentage Index — the three components, the strength-of-schedule feedback loops, why the formula shapes non-conference scheduling decisions across the sport, and why recomputing it is genuinely expensive.

Building MCP servers for NWSL and ECNL soccer data

jk-mcp-nwsl and jk-mcp-ecnl give Claude direct access to live league data — standings, rosters, RPI, results — from three different upstreams stitched into a coherent tool surface.