How Fastpitch Authority works
Three kinds of number, never mixed. That is the whole idea.
Two names, one thing
There are two websites and they are halves of the same company.
Flex Scorebook is the free app a coach uses to keep the book during a game. He taps a phone, one tap per pitch.
Fastpitch Authority is where those numbers end up — her profile, her stats, her ranking, and the part college coaches can see.
You do not have to use both. A coach can use Flex Scorebook and never look at Fastpitch Authority. A family can have a profile with nothing in it. But her stats only exist if somebody scored the game, and that is why the two are connected.
A college coach gets a hundred emails a week with a girl's stats in them, and he believes almost none of it — because numbers a parent types into a form cannot be checked by anybody. So the girls who really did hit .480 get thrown out with everyone who says they did.
Self-reported
What you enter yourself, including history imported from another app. Always labeled.
Never affects her ranking.
Recorded in Flex Scorebook
Kept live by her coach, pitch by pitch, during the game. Nobody enters it afterwards.
This is what her ranking is built from.
FPA Verified
Measured by our staff on calibrated equipment. Every result carries the device, its serial number, its calibration date, the operator and the conditions.
Claim her profile
Free. Her coach shares a private link, and from that moment her profile belongs to you.
Her stats arrive on their own
Every game her coach finalizes in Flex Scorebook lands on her profile. You do not enter anything.
She gets ranked
Against her age group, division and state, then region, then nationally. Every girl with enough plate appearances is ranked whether her family pays us or not.
Get her seen, when you are ready
Recruiting opens her to verified college coaches. She picks the schools, and only those receive your contact details, and only from 11th grade.
What if her coach does not use Flex Scorebook?
Then her profile will be empty, and we would rather say so plainly than take your money and let you find out.
Her stats come from games somebody scored in Flex Scorebook. No score, no stats, no ranking. We do not accept stats typed in from a paper book or another app for ranking purposes, because a number nobody can check is the exact problem we exist to solve.
What you can do: send her coach to flexscorebook.com (opens in a new tab). It is free for him permanently, it works on any phone, and it works with no signal at the field. Most coaches who try it keep using it because it is faster than paper.
You can also enter her past stats yourself. They will show on her profile, labeled self-reported, so a college coach can see them. They will not count toward her ranking.
What it costs
| What you pay | What you get |
|---|---|
| Freecoach | Full scorekeeping, free team website, claim links (the private link a family uses to take ownership of her profile), pitch counts. Permanently, not a trial. |
| Freefamily | Her profile, every game log, box score and play-by-play, and her ranking shown privately to you. |
| Fastpitch Plus $69.99/yr | Averages and rate stats, the full rankings board with names, weekly movement, her shareable card, 4 video clips. One subscription, both sites, every daughter on your account. |
| Recruiting $199.99/yr | Everything above, plus visible to verified college coaches, her school list, match alerts, 8 video clips. |
| Prospect Day $99 | One day, measured by our staff, results on her profile as verified — measured by our staff, not entered by anyone. 4 staff-shot clips included. |
| Club $499/yr | Every team in a club and every family in them, at no cost to those families. |
| College coaches | Free. Always. |
One subscription covers every daughter on your account. Annual billing. All sales are final.
Who can see her
- Before a family claims her: She appears on her team's public page by jersey number and position only. Her name is not published.
- After you claim her: Claiming means taking ownership of her profile so it belongs to your family. From then on you decide: her profile is private unless you publish it.
- Under 13: Never visible to college coaches. Enforced in our database, not a setting that could be switched by mistake.
- College coaches: Only see athletes whose families bought Recruiting and switched visibility on.
- Your contact details: Released only to programs she has added to her own list, and only from 11th grade. A coach she has not chosen has no way to reach you.
- Venue and start times: Never published for any game, on any page.
How the ranking is worked out
She is ranked against girls in her own age group, division — A, AA, AAA or Major, the competition level her team plays at — and state, then her region, then the whole country. Hitting and pitching are separate.
Rates are adjusted for how little a player has played. Three at bats is pulled toward the average; eighty is not. That stops one good afternoon topping a board, and it means a hot start settles into reality over a season rather than collapsing in a week.
Rankings are recalculated every Monday. Nothing about paying us, or attending our events, is part of the calculation.