It is a small Chrome extension that connects a private ESPN fantasy league to Waiver Wizard in one click. We wrote it ourselves, it is optional, and you can uninstall it as soon as your league is connected. Here is exactly what it does.
The short version
The ESPN Connector is built and published by Waiver Wizard — Fantasy Sports Analytics LLC — the same people who run this site. It is not a third-party extension, it is not resold, and there is no other company involved in it. Our founder, Matthew Ustby, wrote it for exactly one job: to save you from copying cookies out of Developer Tools. You can read more about who we are on our about page.
It is published on the Chrome Web Store under our own name, and went through the store's review process before it was allowed to be listed. Its permissions are shown on that listing, so you can check them against what this page says without taking our word for any of it.
ESPN does not offer a login for outside apps. For a private league, the only way any tool can read your league is with the session your browser already has — two cookies named SWID and espn_s2.
Your browser deliberately blocks ordinary web pages from reading those cookies, which is a good rule and we are not trying to get around it. That leaves two ways to hand them over: open Developer Tools, dig through Application → Cookies, and copy two long strings by hand — or install an extension, which is the one kind of program your browser actually permits to do this, and only after you have approved it. The extension is the same handoff, minus the part where people give up.
Public leagues need none of this. If your league is public we never ask for credentials at all.
That is the entire list. What it cannot see:
Only when you ask it to. It does not run in the background, it does not sync anything on a schedule, and it does not phone home. There are exactly two moments it acts:
Chrome itself enforces who is allowed to talk to the extension: it responds only to pages on fantasywaiverwizard.com, and that restriction is written into the extension's manifest, not into a promise. No other website can use it to ask for your ESPN session, even if it knows the extension is there.
The connector does not log in for you. It reads the session your browser already has, so if you are not signed in to ESPN there is simply nothing for it to find — which is the single most common reason a connection attempt comes back empty.
Before you click Connect:
If you use a private or incognito window for ESPN, sign in normally instead — extensions are switched off in private windows by default, so the connector cannot see that session.
Connecting is a one-time handoff. Once your league is linked, Waiver Wizard talks to ESPN on its own and never needs the extension again, so you are welcome to uninstall it straight after setup — your league, your alerts, and your settings all stay exactly as they are.
The only reason to keep it is convenience later: ESPN sessions expire eventually, and when yours does you will need to reconnect. With the extension installed that is one click; without it, you can reinstall it then, or use the manual steps below.
To remove it:
You can also open chrome://extensions, find Waiver Wizard ESPN Connector, and click Remove.
The extension is a shortcut, never a requirement. You can find the same two values yourself in about a minute and paste them into the setup form — we have a 40-second video and written steps on the manual setup page. Everything works identically afterwards.
Full details of what we store and why are in our Privacy Policy, which has a section devoted to this extension. If anything here leaves you uneasy, email us and ask — we would rather answer the question than have you guess.