March Madness is upon us. Success in March is about one thing and one thing only: Match-Ups. The draw that you might get can make the difference between a Cinderella Story and an early round exit.

With conference tournaments craziness changing the at-large bids once again, everyone is always waiting to see “Are we in? Who are we playing?” We were discussing from a coaches perspective the amount of time that goes into evaluating the team that you just drew in the first round of the tournament.

Most likely, it’s going to be a team that you have zero familiarity with and are scrambling to get everything and anything you can to gain that competitive edge.

So we were talking to the team at Just Play and simply asked, how can teams better prepare or inform themselves of which games to watch vs. which to spend less time looking at? How do they get data that is both useful and easy to help guide game preparation?

And they came back with an awesome report to help.

They just launched a beta of Team Similarity Report using a matching algorithm that takes many different data points into account. Basically, it’s just a fancy way to say how similar (or different) your team is to other teams in NCAA, your conference or even your upcoming opponents schedule. Additionally, you can create your own using the data points that you find most valuable in assessing match ups.

Teams can leverage this report to give them better insight in which games they need to watch vs. which games they should spend less time looking at.

The algorithm will allow teams to select different splits such as: Overall, Conference, Last 5, Home, Away, Neutral, vs. Top 25 and each month of play and automatically recalculate the results accordingly.

In this season where preparation is key and perfect preparation wins championships, we thought sharing Now is the best time to launch this critical feature which will save you time and provide practical insight to help you win!

As always Just Play leads the way in helping you coach, teach and prepare your team to win, and we thought this news was something you all would appreciate.

For more information about Just Play, you can check out their website at justplaysolutions.com and set up a demo to learn more.