Track your favorite team with College Baskeball Schedules
The 2014-2015 college basketball season gets under way next week. Thousands of games will be played between the start of the season and the NCAA tournament in March. College Basketball Schedules, a free universal app, can help fans keep up with their favorite team so they know just when, where, and who those teams play, if you overlook some glaring issues. This app requires iOS 5.0 or later.
Let's first look at what this app does. Users have four options, Schedules, Scores, Game Day, and Trivia. If you choose schedules you get to choose from eleven conferences and Other. Under Other you will find just three schools, Gonzaga, BYU, and UMass. Under the conference choices users can select any of the teams in the conference and get that team's schedule going forward. These schedules come from ESPN so the same schedules are available at espn.com. Also the developer claims users can get all the major college teams but they fail to give access to the MIssouri Valley Conference, the Atlantic 10, and the West Coast Conference, all of which have had teams in the final eight of the NCAA tournament in recent years.
The Scores layout is similar. But you cannot choose individual teams, just scores by conference. These also come from ESPN and are broken down by day. You can move forward or back a day at a time to find your teams score from a previous game or check to see when the next game is. At the bottom of the scores and also the schedules, users get a list of news stories, also from espn.com.
The other two sections are Trivia and Game Day. Trivia offers a ten question multiple choice quiz and users get points for correct answers. I took the quiz three times. The second time, three of the questions from the first time showed up and by the third try nine of the ten questions were repeats. The Game Day choice brings up a list users can choose to see the latest poll information, where to buy gear(links to amazon.com) or where to get tickets.(link to ticketliquidators.com) But nothing about any game or meaningful information about your team.
One issue I had with this app is the way it uses ads. Instead of small ads at the top or the bottom of the screen, College Basketball Scores throws up full page ads that have to be closed before you can continue to use the app. Not sure what triggers the ads' appearance but they pop up often. For US$0.99 you can remove the ads.
Overall College Basketball Schedules was a disappointment other than as a means to get ads in front of users. Not all schedules are available plus news, scores, and schedules are from ESPN or other sources, sometimes directly from the schools' athletic departments so nothing original in the app. If you are a big college basketball fan like me, you can find any number of apps that will keep you better informed.
