HUDL keeps costly eye on athletes

Hudl has changed the way high school student athletes study game film and improve their skill set. Hudl is a service that has been used at Papillion-La Vista South since 2015. Hudl has given Papio South athletes the ability to analyze footage and improve their game. Head Varsity football coach Tim Clemenger is seeing the value watching film has for its players. Film and Hudl are a large part of the Titan Football program, and the athletes have bought into it.

“Players come up to us with things they noticed and have gathered in the film,” Clemenger said. Clemenger finds value in film as well. Football plays happen so quickly, and he believes that they need to be recorded and analyzed for athletes and teams to be able to learn and grow from them.

“A football play only lasts four to seven seconds, but a lot goes into that four to seven seconds,” Clemenger said. The value Hudl provides Papio South athletics comes at a high price. $13,000 annually is spent on Hudl at the school. The $13,000 gives the school many different services for athletes and coaches to use. This money comes from the schools athletic budget, but was originally funded by the Titan Defenders.

At its very base, Hudl is a service that allows for the recording of games and the uploading of footage onto the Hudl app or website. What started at our school seven years ago as a service for football only has now expanded  into basketball, volleyball, and soccer as well.

Hudl was a service created in 2006 originally to help high school football players and coaches. Hudl is used in many different athletic fields, but high school football is the biggest, according to Hudl Content Creator Brad Hilligoss.

Hudl is used primarily in American high school football, with 99% of high schools in the country using it. Hudl is also used for many other  competitive team sports, ranging from basketball to field hockey. Hudl is also used outside of high school sports. Hudl’s services are used all throughout the world for professional sports.

“We have a lot of international teams that use Hudl and our elite products,” said Hilligoss. Their services are used in the English Premier League, which is a top international soccer league, as well as the National Rugby league in Australia.

“English Premier League is the top soccer organization. We work with every single team in the EPL and we have teams in Australia that use it for rugby and Australian rules football,” said Hilligoss. However, Hudl is used in high schools primarily.

In Papillion-La Vista South, three mains services are used. One is Hudl Focus,. a service that allows games to be recorded live to the PLV Media YouTube channel as well as the Hudl app. In the Titan Arena as well as Foundation Field, there are Focus cameras that record games. The cameras have the capability to follow the motion of the ball and the motion of the players.

It takes precise positioning for these cameras to capture everything that’s happening. PLS Athletic Director Jeremy Van Ackeren acknowledged the importance of that precision.

“You have to have it set up perfectly so it sees the court or field just right,” Van Ackeren said. A coach who wants games to be recorded wit

h Hudl Focus must input the start and end times into the camera, so that  it will record the inserted time slot.

Hudl Sideline is used by the Titan football team for the review and analysis of plays. Footage from the focus camera attached to  the press box is transmitted  to iPads on the sidelines, where assistant coaches can show and talk about plays in real time. Clemenger said he valued the use of Hudl Sideline.

“When sideline works, it’s awesome and you can make lots of corrections,” Clemenger said. Clemenger and his coaching staff use Hudl primarily to prepare for the upcoming  games, as well as studying previous ones. This is how coaches spend most of their time on Hudl.

“The biggest thing is evaluating the previous game, then putting a game plan together for our next opponent. In our little Hudl world, that’s probably 90% of it,” Clemenger said.

One of Hudl’s goals as a company is to make a coach’s life easier. Coaches dedicate hours toward their teams and players. Hudl aims to give back time to these coaches.

“We want to free up a coach’s time to help them be as productive and impactful as they could be in their role,” Hilligoss said. Hilligoss believes everything that Hudl provides simplifies the high school coaching experience.      

“Their time is extraordinarily pressurized as a coach of a sport. If anyone coaches multiple sports, the biggest commodity that they have is time. So we want to make tools that save them that time,” Hilligoss said.

Hudl also aims to make athletes’ lives easier. Many high school athletes have a dream of performing at a higher level, whether collegiately or professionally, and Hudl wants to help them get to that point.

“If we can give athletes the tools to get better and maybe to give themselves a better shot to go to college or further their education, that’s what it’s about,” Hilligoss said.

Hudl has grown dramatically since its creation in 2006. According to Hilligoss, they’ve grown in a few major areas. One of those areas is the company’s reach. They have expanded outside of Nebraska on a large scale since the company’s founding.

“We were founded in Lincoln, Nebraska, and a company that was founded in Nebraska now has offices all over the world. We have an office in London, we have an office in Italy. We have offices and employees all over South America. So we have people around the world,” Hilligoss said.

Not only do they have people around the world, but the Hudl services are being used on a higher level. They are being used beyond just high school sports, but in professional sports as well. To Hilligoss, Hudl’s impact on the sports world has grown.

“Now we currently have over 3000 employees around the world working to support sports at every level. We have second grade basketball teams that are using video but we also have the NBA, the NFL, English Premier League and Olympic sports using it,” Hilligoss said.

Hudl, to its core, is a service for coaches and athletes to watch film. Many athletes that participate in a competitive team sport watch game film.

“What film allows you to do is to see something that’s not what your own eyes saw, and it’s a source of truth that everyone can come look at and say, we can’t argue with this,” Hilligoss said. Hudl has changed the way athletes all across the world can watch film and improve. At Papio South, thousands of dollars every year are spent on Hudl and all the services that come with it. As long as Hudl is at Papio South, it will continue to make athletes’ lives easier.