Team Splitter

A genuinely random shuffle

Paste in your list of names, choose how many teams, and it shuffles the full list randomly before dividing it evenly — no bias toward whoever's listed first, which is the usual complaint about picking teams by hand.

Works well for sports, classroom groups, or splitting up a big friend group for game night without anyone feeling like the draft was rigged.

When names don't divide evenly

If the number of names doesn't divide cleanly by the number of teams — say, 7 people into 2 teams — the extra person or people land on the earliest teams in the shuffled order, so team sizes differ by at most one. That's the fairest way to handle a remainder without leaving anyone off a team or making one team noticeably bigger than the rest.

Why a genuine shuffle matters more than it seems

The obvious alternative — going down the list picking alternating names for each team — sounds fair but isn't, since it still depends entirely on the order the list happened to be typed in, and people rarely type names in a truly random order (friends get listed together, stronger players sometimes get listed first). A real shuffle first, before any dividing happens, is what actually removes list-order as a hidden source of bias, which matters more for anything with a competitive stake, like sports teams, than it does for something purely social.

Splitting by more than just headcount

This tool splits purely by count, with no concept of skill level or existing pairs that should be kept apart or together — for a scenario where that matters (avoiding putting two people who don't get along on the same team, or trying to balance skill level roughly evenly), it works best as a starting shuffle that you then hand-adjust for the one or two constraints that actually matter, rather than expecting it to model constraints it was never built to know about.