Coaches Toolbox

AD Insights: When It’s Not Too Good to Be True

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When Don Kurth was first introduced to Hudl, he was dubious. “When things are too good to be true, they usually are,” he stated. After a year with an athletic department package, he’s singing a different tune. 

Expanding the Opportunity

Last year, technology use exploded. Every industry was affected by the power the internet gave consumers during a pandemic. With this change came a learning curve, especially for those who never had this digital connectivity before. 

This was the case for Brookfield Central High School’s athletic programs. Kurth needed to find a solution that would help all of his sports teams maximize their development, even when they couldn’t be on the field or court. That’s when he turned to Hudl. 

He was immediately impressed by the ease and reliability Hudl’s school-wide package provided. Though some sports had used Hudl before, this upgrade allowed new teams to experience the impact of video and data. 

As Kurth’s coaches adjusted to this new opportunity, their adoption accelerated. Anyone who used Hudl got more time back in their day—for teaching their players and personal time. It was a win-win scenario for continued development and work-life balance during a very hard year.

“People Were Watching”

Hudl also changed the game for Brookfield Central’s livestreaming. 

After upgrading to the athletic department package, Kurth was able to receive, set up and use his Focus cameras to stream games to a school YouTube channel in no time. Since Nov. 1st, 2020, there have been over 100,000 views. In short, “People were watching,” Kurth said. 

Even with the school’s internet interruptions, the benefits of livestreaming were extraordinary. It scaled the reach of their teams’ games, providing access to all community members for both home and away contests. 

Not only did the community appreciate the new video service, they now expected it. Livestreaming will continue at Brookfield Central, even as in-person attendances begins to return. And as Kurth looks to meet these fan goals, he knows Hudl will be a staple of Brookfield-Central’s athletic system.

New and Next 

In fact, coaches are already discovering how Hudl’s products complement other technologies. Take Brookfield Central’s women’s soccer coach Daniel Makal, who combined Focus camera footage with GPS wearables. This enabled athletes to recognize how their on-field movements could be more efficient.   

So now what does Kurth say about these products? “This is no longer an old guy using VHS,” he laughed. He’s right. It’s an army of resources to help programs, athletes and coaches adapt, innovate and connect. If those are your goals, learn how you can bring Hudl to your athletic department today. 

Learn more about Hudl Athletic Department packages.


A Flawed Reality: When it’s Time to Reflect

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Two years after landing the head coaching position he so badly desired, Coach Jones (not his real name) was quietly fired. The administrative staff realized they’d made a mistake hiring Jones. They weren’t quite sure why he didn’t work out. They did their homework.

Well, enough to consider him a solution to their coaching needs. However, what they couldn’t see is what did him in. After spending a month analyzing Jones, here are the flaws I uncovered:

  • Is overly demanding
  • Doesn’t listen
  • Is intolerant of dissent
  • Takes the credit for success
  • Blames others for mistakes
  • Is untrustworthy—doesn’t do what he says he’ll do
  • Is aloof—seen as arrogant
  • Has a dictatorial style
  • Is abrasive

It’s fairly obvious, after the fact, that Coach Jones has some serious flaws related to interpersonal interactions (he is comfortable with a transactional style of conversation) and relationship building. Nowhere in his flaws will you find a glitch in his knowledge of the sport. He has a great command of the X’s and O’s. But he has some serious team building flaws.

The two primary blind spots that emerged are: 1) his need to be right in all situations, and 2) avoiding accountability to his players and staff. Coach Jones’ “I know” attitude produced such flaws as taking credit for success and his unwillingness to listen. The desire to avoid accountability (to the stakeholders) produced his blaming of others and his dictatorial leadership style and abrasive attitude toward relationship building created cool relationships between him and his staff and players.

The prognosis for Coach Jones is not good. If he fails to discover his fatal flaws his coaching career will never recover. As a prominent coach told me, “We’re pretty good at directing our players to change, but not so great at changing ourselves.”

New to the Second Edition of Coaching for Leadership!

We are pleased to announce a new chapter to the second edition of the best-selling Coaching for Leadership. The chapter, The Big Shift: Unlock Your Team’s Potential by Creating Player-Led Teambuilding, connects the previous edition of this book to its origin, as well as to the future of team sports.

The new chapter sets forth a practical and applicable agenda for change and improvement. The reader is introduced to seven vital elements of change; seven shifts of traditional mental models that lead to the new core principles necessary for creating a player-led team culture. Click here for more information about Coaching for Leadership

About Cory Dobbs, Ed.D.

Cory Dobbs is the founder of The Academy for Sport Leadership and a nationally recognized thought leader in the areas of leadership and team building.  Cory is an accomplished researcher of human experience. Cory engages in naturalistic inquiry seeking in-depth understanding of social phenomena within their natural setting.

A college basketball coach, Cory’s coaching background includes experience at the NCAA DII, NJCAA, and high school levels of competition.  After a decade of research and development Cory unleashed the groundbreaking Teamwork Intelligence program for student-athletics. Teamwork Intelligence illuminates the process of designing an elite team by using the 20 principles and concepts along with the 8 roles of a team player he’s uncovered while performing research.

Cory has worked with professional athletes, collegiate athletic programs, and high schools teaching leadership and team building as a part of the sports experience and education process.  As a consultant and trainer Dr. Dobbs has worked with Fortune 500 organizations such as American Express, Honeywell, and Avnet, as well as medium and small businesses. Dr. Dobbs taught leadership and organizational change at Northern Arizona University, Ohio University, and Grand Canyon University.


How to Promote Your Athletic Program with Hudl

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Coaches at all levels of competition rely on Hudl to develop their athletes, grow their team and promote their program. Here are ways you can use Hudl to share your team’s best moments and rally the community.

 

Show off with a team profile.
Every team gets a public profile page when they join Hudl that includes your team’s high­lights, the sea­son sched­ule and your ros­ter of ath­letes, with links to their indi­vid­ual pro­file and high­lights. Now all you need to do is customize your team profiles. Start by adding your school logo as the team profile picture. Once that’s saved, include a tagline to share the team’s philosophy with fans. We’ve seen quotes, hashtags, links to Twitter accounts, you name it.

Get your teams and fans hyped.
Highlight videos are a great way to pump up athletes and fans. Encourage your coaches to create a highlight from their last game to watch as a team. And if they have Hudl Assist, it’s easy to use the stats and reports they get back from our analysts to find highlight-worthy moments. With spot shadows, photos and the right kind of music, they’ll have no trouble rallying everyone together for a win.
 
Leave the game highlights to us.
Teams with Hudl Assist get access to detailed stats and reports, saving their coaches time to focus on developing their athletes and promoting their team. Hudl Assist teams also get auto-generated highlight reels of their team’s best plays based on their Assist stats. 
 
Note: Available for football, basketball, volleyball, soccer, lacrosse and ice hockey teams.
 
Celebrate the season.
Take time to remember each game’s best moments by creating season highlights. You (or your coaches) can add team photos or slides with season stats and athlete awards—whatever information is most important to your teams and fans.
 
Embed a highlight reel.
When you embed a highlight reel, all your fans have to do is click play. Create an athlete of the week series and embed their most recent highlight on your school’s website. Make your own version of SportsCenter Top 5 each week with team or athlete highlight reels. Or tweet the auto-generated highlight from your most recent win with #WinOfTheWeek. The possibilities are endless.
 
Share it out on social.
With the click of a button, you can share a highlight reel or the link to a team’s profile to Facebook or Twitter. Want to push it somewhere else? Copy the URL and paste it wherever you please—in an email, a text message, Instagram or your school’s athletic website.
 
Livestream your next game.
Don’t let bad weather, bumper-to-bumper traffic and late nights at the office stand in the way of your players’ biggest fans missing their games. Hudl Focus not only automatically records and uploads your film, but it also streams it so fans, family and friends never miss a home game. You can embed a stream directly on your school’s website or stream them to YouTube. And use Twitter to get your fans watching the livestream like this team did.


The Power of an Athletic Department That Focuses on Culture, Relationships & the Extra Mile

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Former coach and athletic director Cory McCarthy shares how focusing on three main priorities made a huge impact on New Mission High School — and how they can do the same for your school.

Basketball transformed my school, New Mission High School (Boston, Mass.). We were once an alternative education school with low student growth. Our basketball teams had jerseys with numbers made of tape. We had to take public transportation to the games. Practice was running two miles to a train station and back. Having gym time was about as impossible as shaving while skydiving.

But we had players who believed this chance to play was their opportunity to survive. I remember sitting in the back of a bus from Somerville fielding questions like, “Cory, you think I can make it? Can you tell us about college? Why you still here man? We’re terrible.” We weren’t talking about basketball, we were talking about life.

Two years later, that same team was in the state championship game with only six players, one just eight post-op from hernia surgery. Our small alternative education school with the taped jerseys won a state championship, and our entire school was there to witness it.

Two state championship teams in two years.

Another year later, we had attracted even more students and clinched another state championship. And finally, when a school on the other side of town closed, we got a gym of our own.

Because of sports, we cemented our identity. Because of sports, I began to see more parents at games and meetings. Coaches can easily see the inherent value of sports—our challenge is to get kids to believe in themselves, change their course and inspire others.

Throughout my years as a five-time state championship coach, I’ve learned there are three major components in building a program that will provide student-athletes the best experience and character development possible.

Culture

Not only do coaches need to do whatever it takes to help players believe in their own value to the team, they must also understand that it’s not always the game plan that wins the game—it’s the team’s identity and philosophy.

Think of culture as a loose ball. You gotta dive for it. My focus is on making sure my players handle the honorable variables of being an athlete, like time on task, engagement, random acts of kindness and, most importantly, the two “extras” that help you win in the classroom—extra credit and extra help.

There are so many things coaches can do to build a strong culture. I spent my first paycheck as a basketball coach on making 300 t-shirts with our team logo and mantra. I handed those out to anyone who would listen. Months later, many of our freshmen showed up to school with New Mission t-shirts already on their backs. These kids had never played for me, but they were already connected to our team culture. They were Titans.

My focus is on making sure my players handle the honorable variables of being an athlete.

Relationships

If you have no idea what your players’ home situations or backgrounds are, how can you expect to coach them? Player development is not exclusive to skills and drills anymore.

It’s the conversations that happen after practice. It’s the bus ride to or from games. It’s the impact a coach can have on a player in their most vulnerable moments. You don’t even have to talk—it’s more important to listen.

Relationships help players buy in. I always kept an identity chart of my players so I could help them understand the value of being their best self even when it was hard. Be the example—teach them how to show who they are by showing them who you are.

The Extra Mile

Coaching is a job where when you win, someone else gets the credit, and when you lose, “It’s on you bruh.” It’s full of ups and downs. But when all else fails, trust in your players.

As coaches, we need to remind ourselves of the impact going the extra mile can have. It matters if I drive the 20 miles to take a player to a college visit or show up to a parent meeting. It might be the difference between life or death if I don’t check up on a kid in the summer to make sure drugs or violence hasn’t swallowed them whole.

How to Get Started

  1. Build relationships with all of your players.
  2. Have the NCAA qualifying conversation with them in 9th grade, and use the guidelines to help them in their academics.
  3. Create an environment that reflects success and family. Develop mantras, post quotes about your program philosophy or create incentives—whatever it takes to help them understand that who they are on the court is who they are off of it.
  4. Be intentional about your goals. Every step forward is a step closer to a championship.

Everyone seems to hate the phrase, “Ball is life.” But from my experience, it is.


AD Insights: Everyone Is a Student of the Game

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Learn how an independent college prep school in Tennessee used Hudl to teach athletes and parents the value of video analysis.

 

Things at McCallie work a little differently. As an independent school, they have more opportunities than usual to give their students the very best, including access to premier academic curriculum and superior athletic programs. Do-it-all coach, teacher and administrator Adam Tolar knew Hudl could help them expand this excellence.

McCallie was already using Hudl, but only in an a la carte capacity. “We were recording everything,” Tolar said, “from weightlifting sessions to gameplay.” But having the entire athletic department on Hudl would help McCallie make the most of the suite of products, including benefitting from unlimited storage. Tolar went to the school board to champion the athletic department package. It has since transformed McCallie’s athletic potential.
 

 

The ‘Hudl’ Guy

 
Tolar is now known as the “Hudl guy.” At first, his main responsibility was assisting with training coaches new to Hudl. Their upgrade into a full department package came with customized education for coaches that Tolar helped organize. This training enabled coaches to apply what they learned into game plans.

Now, almost every sport at McCallie has a coach educated in Hudl’s products. But Tolar still thinks they haven’t unlocked its full capacity. He’s excited about the ability to get better.

Accountability is McCallie’s mantra, and it works both ways for coaches and athletes. Hudl’s text effects feature allows Tolar to pose questions directly on film clips. If an athlete doesn’t answer a question, he knows they haven’t completed their assignment. Conversations through video ensure athletes found and understood corrections so they could make them in practices and games.

Hudl has also created a growth pipeline for McCallie’s young athletes. “Middle school athletes don’t know how to watch film,” said Tolar. With their athletic department package, McCallie could begin the film education process at the middle school level.

The younger teams can access practice film to help them learn proper techniques. With Hudl, they’ll understand earlier on what they need to do to reach the varsity level.

 

You Never Stop Learning

 
Teaching is a cornerstone for Hudl with the entire McCallie sports community. “It’s brought players and parents into the fold, and created transparency,” said Tolar.

At the start of term, Tolar meets with parents to educate them on Hudl’s features, and the right things to look out for. That way they can cheer on their athlete from afar and play a role in their development.

Hudl’s easy-to-use features help hold athletes accountable for their actions. They can watch, analyze and use footage to focus on the important aspects of their game. Products at Hudl have made McCallie athletes true students of the game. 

The Right Way

 
For Tolar, Hudl provides peace of mind and confidence. He knows their products offer McCallie’s athletic programs the best. And with superior customer service, he has a whole entire team of assistants ready to support him.

In a world where the standard is changing, and learning is crucial to success, let Hudl help your school learn the right way.