Technology has boosted filming of high school sports

Posted 1/5/23

There is normally a hatch, served by a vertical ladder, which leads from the older press boxes at football fields around East Texas to the top of the press box. It was up those ladders that one lucky person would go, on Friday nights, to film the game. 

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Technology has boosted filming of high school sports

The current family of AI-incorporated cameras which are used in different versions of the Hudl Focus system.
The current family of AI-incorporated cameras which are used in different versions of the Hudl Focus system.
Courtesy photo
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There is normally a hatch, served by a vertical ladder, which leads from the older press boxes at football fields around East Texas to the top of the press box. It was up those ladders that one lucky person would go, on Friday nights, to film the game. 

In the early days, a 16mm motion picture camera was used. One of the junior coaches on the staff would then take the film, post-game, to the bus station and put it on a bus bound for Dallas. Sometime in the next 24 hours, the developed film would be returned, on a bus, to one of the standard hubs, like Tyler.

A coach would retrieve it for dissection by the coaching staff over the weekend. It also started the rotation, between schools, of swapping game films in advance of an upcoming matchup. 

The technology began to change from 16mm to Super8 to VHS tape. Dallas was no longer required, but in principle, the system remained unchanged, until three students at the University of Nebraska began to figure out how to better support the Cornhuskers. 

Those three students, David Graff, Brian Kaiser and John White, were in a combined MBA/computer science program. Graff also worked part-time with the athletic department and for a while roomed with Cornhusker quarterback Zac Taylor.  

As Greg Nelson, Hudl vice president for high schools, clubs and youth-level sports recounted, “David saw mountains of DVDs in the Nebraska athletic offices. He knew there had to be a better way to record the action and use it to teach the team.”

These were the circumstances which spawned the sports technology company, Hudl.

That company has now become one of the most recognizable brand names in the sporting world. Its success story will likely be studied by business students for a long time. 

Since the initial efforts in Lincoln, Neb., Hudl has fielded over 13,000 camera systems and has captured over 1.3 million recordings of games and practices.  

As Nelson explained, “The initial objective was to produce quality video which could be easily used by coaches to improve performance.”

Despite many changes in technology and connectivity, and an explosion of sports clamoring for better and better tools, the objective remains the same today.

Nelson has been with Hudl from those early days; he is employee number 16. He explained that despite all the technological changes, the mission of Hudl is unchanged.

“We try to give every athlete the shot they deserve,” he stated. 

From the University of Nebraska, Hudl followed Taylor to his coaching stint with the N.Y. Jets professional football team. Shortly thereafter, however, the leadership of Hudl made the decision to market their recording systems at the scholastic level. It was a spot-on decision.

In the first year, they went from providing services at 12 high schools to 350 high schools. Nelson related that they sent one team member to Texas on a long marketing tour.

“We were doing football, so it made sense to go to Texas,” Nelson recounted.

Aldine High School, in Houston, and Dallas Lutheran High School were two of the company’s earliest accounts in Texas.

The company shaped into four divisions: high school, club and youth sports; collegiate; professional; and support.  

Nelson said the initial business plan called for video – from practically any source – to be uploaded to the Hudl website. Hudl leadership soon recognized, however, that the increasing quality of camera technology and the need for standardized high-quality recordings were critical to their vision. 

The company acquired a globally recognized firm in smart camera technology, the Dutch firm Incatec. By leveraging Incatec’s expertise, Hudl developed and fielded a cutting-edge camera system which could be permanently installed and could upload three views automatically. 

The system, Hudl Focus, was an immediate hit.

“We wanted to install a quality system which schools could, ‘set it up and forget it.’ Hudl Focus uses three cameras to simultaneously record action on a court and software containing artificial intelligence (AI) features to follow the action.    

Alba-Golden athletic director Drew Webster is a big fan of the system.

“It makes it so easy for us to bring video into coaching,” he said.

Hudl Focus has been installed in the Panther gymnasium. Webster continued, “We also use it to replay assemblies, and at the end of the day, we can use it in a security role.”

He pulled up some examples of recent game recordings on his telephone. Fans can view games played at Alba-Golden through the schools YouTube site.

Nelson explained that the Hudl Focus system started as an indoor system.

“We first wanted to produce and field a high-quality system indoors, before we began to weatherize an outdoor version,” he said.

Hudl has grown at an alarming rate. It now claims 3,000 employees worldwide and is involved in recording 38 sports. The rapid growth required intense focus from company leadership.

“We have always been a company which produced a quality product first, before moving on to the next logical step,” Nelson said. 

That strategic focus on quality, as well as acting on customer feedback, has kept the company on a path of success.

Nelson offered, “Our leadership asks constantly, ‘what is the most immediate problem we need to fix, today?’”

The number of supportive functions which Hudl enables is impressive. It has a huge role in recruiting athletes, playbook development, individual technique development and team effectiveness.

The future, according to Nelson, will take Hudl services into the realms of automatic, real-time statistical compilation; jersey number identification; aquatic sports; wearable data collection; geodetic and 3-dimensional capability.

While all these new developments may lend themselves to other industries, Hudl, according to Nelson, is entirely focused on assisting coaches in developing their athletes.

It is indeed a long way from putting that 16mm film role on a bus to Dallas, and it is reassuring that the vision remains the same.