If you lot double-decker at the Varsity level in basketball game, you've probably either heard of Hudl (or Krossover, which I accept not used) or accept been given access by your Advertising. This is a review of Hudl for use by basketball coaches on how it can assistance with capturing, editing and analyzing game film and statistics. The review is based on our use of it at Saugus Loftier Schoolhouse during the 2016-2017 Girls Varsity basketball flavour.

Below, I'll give an overview of:

  • What Hudl Does for Basketball Coaches
  • Our Process Before and After Hudl for cardinal functions
  • Benefits and Weaknesses of Using Hudl

What Hudl Does for Basketball Coaches

Hudl is a game film software platform that enables you to upload, tag, cut and share video with your players as well as publish team highlights online. It'south one of a few software tools out at that place to upload and tag game motion picture for basketball game.

In general it will assist you with the following:

  • Capture and centrally store practice and game flick to make available to your coaches and players
  • Create highlights and cut video for individual and team utilize including automatic highlights created for players based on tags
  • Easily tag stats for both your team and the opponents
  • Report on team and individual stat reports including game summaries, season stats, shot charts, etc.

In short, it helps you to centrally store your game film to share with players and coaches while providing like shooting fish in a barrel ways to tag the game for cut video clips or highlights and tracking overall private and team stats for you and your opponent.

At Saugus High School, we received utilize of the Hudl tool since the Football team uses information technology and the school bought a license. This was our showtime year using Hudl for game picture.

For the 3 years previous, we had used a combination of Youtube and Google Spreadsheets to share game film, create highlights and track stats.

Let's go through what each of these looked like before and after Hudl for us at Saugus.

Game Flick Capture, Editing and Sharing

Earlier Hudl

For every game, Mark, our head coach, would provide a camcorder to our team managers or member of the JV squad to record our game. He'd take the moving picture, upload the video to his reckoner and so would upload to a Youtube account for coaches to view the movie (see below).

Video Basketball

In many cases, uploading twice (once to computer and then Youtube) could take two-iii days to be bachelor to coaches. To cut that picture into highlights for the players, Marking would typically use iMovie to create shorter video clips that he would upload to Youtube for use before practices for players.

In summary, we had the post-obit bottlenecks for game film:

  1. Making the game film available to coaches took too long (especially when nosotros had a three game week)
  2. Cutting film for the team much less for specific players was cumbersome and fourth dimension consuming.

After Hudl

Nosotros use the Hudl iPad app to capture all of our games. Our squad managers or a member of the JV team normally records the game via an iPad we supply. We had used a camcorder but overall the Hudl iPad app enables united states to easily record and about importantly easily upload the game film to the Hudl site once the iPad makes it to WiFi. Typically, nosotros tin get the game film up and available the dark of the game.

After the video uploads, it is made available to all players and coaches and we can brainstorm tagging the game (come across more than on that below). Every once in a while we experience a lag in the film but overall the app performs simply every bit good as the camcorder does with final upload.

Nosotros played with the video highlights and playlist a lot over the flavour and what nosotros concluded with is this:

  • Tagging: I'll go into what tagging entails below merely basically this enables us to become through the picture easier by tagging the primal plays happening throughout the game. I likewise like the feature where you lot can get to all video clips that correspond with stats by clicking on the links for the stat numbers with a single click.
  • Sharing Video: We leverage the sharing characteristic with opposing coaches on occasion to share scouting film but do not use this feature all the time.
  • Automated Highlights: If you finalize the tags for your games, automated highlights will be created for the players and the game based on rules (it ordinarily pulls clips tagged for double doubles, multiple steals, blocks, buzzer beaters to name a few). While these aren't terribly instructive, the players similar to view their highlights and information technology's cool that this requires no piece of work to do other than tagging.
  • Squad & Player Highlights: These highlights are ones yous can designate while watching film to potentially include in external highlights for a histrion or team. The problem with these is moreso that they are built for positive plays vs. educational activity film and in that location are bug that brand it a bit cumbersome to utilize at the moment which I'll get to below in "weaknesses".
  • Playlists: This feature enables y'all to group snippets of moving picture together under a specific category (i.e. specific inbound plays or sets). Subsequently playing effectually with playlists, nosotros ultimately came to the following as the easiest and best solution for using these as educational / pump up videos for our players. Hither's what we did:
    • For each player we created a playlist with their name (i.e. Allie M or Rachel Northward). As we watched the game film, the coaches were able to add highlights to these playlists which we shared with the players. The highlights were a combination of recognizing great plays and areas of comeback. Hudl's message and writing tools help to provide instruction on the video clips which we used to communicate with the players on each highlight.
    • This worked pretty well overall equally it gave us another method of advice with players that they could watch on their own time and showed them in game points of emphasis. This was independent of game film nosotros'd show before practices to the total team.

Hudl Video Highlights

The Departure

There were a few main differences before and after Hudl.

  1. Game Film Turnaround Time Decreased Significantly: We have reduced the picture turnaround time from 2-three days to it being uploaded the same day in nearly cases. Nosotros also have made a consistent effort to record and upload all games which didn't ever happen before.
  2. More Player Specific Film: As we mentioned with Playlists, nosotros've been able to produce more clips to assist coach players based on their in-game play. This was corking mode to emphasize success and areas of improvement without taking up exercise or film time with the whole team.
  3. Players Create Their Own Highlights: This is a feature that only a few of our players have used only Hudl enables players to create their ain highlights and is a feature that I believe more than players will take reward of in the future.

Tracking and Analyzing Stats

Before Hudl

This is our fourth year coaching at the varsity level and we've been becoming more and more sophisticated in how we apply stats to understand and validate our thoughts on the team and players. Our outset few years, we only kept points stats and some rebound statistics from the book. The last two years with picture show, we've evolved into tracking everything from the box score too as some advanced metrics that we can apply to analyze progress and players.

I like spreadsheets and equally such I put together a whopper to track all of our stats from our games. To measure the stats I tracked manually while watching game film for all players. I and so put in the stats for individual games into separate tabs for all players and had it flow into subsequent Total tabs for actor stats and overall team stats. The spreadsheet was over 30 tabs (see beneath)!

Get-go off, this spreadsheet was cumbersome. Not only was it relying on my paw counts watching film but it was also relying on me not making a mistake in the formulas of the spreadsheet. It was still very useful only far from platonic.

*And you'll also detect that we didn't have all the game stats. Which is something we've cleared up with Hudl.

After Hudl

This season we went through and tagged every game once it was uploaded into Hudl. Tagging requires you to go through the game and tag every statistic for every player for both your opponent and your team. Information technology's pretty intuitive and I actually enjoyed doing it every bit I watched dorsum the game flick as I got a better sense of how our players and squad played.

Tagging a unmarried game in Hudl took about 2 – 2 1/ii hours to practice and so it is a commitment. Notwithstanding, once tagged it does all the work for you in terms of accumulating the statistics for each actor and game summary. With our game films tagged we would look at the following:

  • Actor operation to date: We were able to come across the functioning of our players based on avant-garde stats and things such as Plus Minus, which nosotros never had before. We were also able to share stats with players on their season.
  • Game Summaries: For each game, the summary was very useful for us as we decompressed from a win and a loss to determine what we or the opponent did that led to the result.
    • For example, in one of our losses, we realized that our opponent shot 50% from the flooring and forty% from 3 in a 1 point loss. While there were things we definitely worked on from that game, we could also chalk information technology up to a team that had the all-time game of their flavor on shots they don't usually striking (which we know from watching scouting movie).
  • Quarter Assay: This was a big one for usa as we realized that in our games nosotros were greatly outscoring teams in the fourth quarter. This isn't as well surprising every bit we are a deep team and we play fast which oft tires teams out simply it was good affidavit in our strategy and dandy halftime and stop of the 3rd quarter content that we used a ton with the team.

Hudl Reports & Analytics

In brusk, Hudl has helped u.s.a. get to where we wanted to be while making it easier to compile and view other metrics that we weren't able to measure before. Information technology helped united states of america inform player evaluation, areas of emphasis and to test our assumptions on the team.

Benefits and Weaknesses of Hudl

Overall, Hudl has been a tremendous tool for the states to organize both our game film and our statistics. Information technology has saved united states of america hours on doing what we had to do manually and helped to amend expose this work to our players. That being said, there are nonetheless a few things I'd like to encounter Hudl better in the tool to make it even better (and tin can tell you the Hudl team has been very open minded and attentive to these requests.)

So here are my major benefits and weaknesses:

Benefits

  1. Saves Time on Film: Information technology profoundly reduces the time to make game picture available and centralized. This is huge for our team and if you don't use game film, I'd highly recommend you start!
  2. Deeper Stats & Analytics: While it doesn't provide everything I'd desire (I'd like the ability to tag custom plays) it provides the box score and more advanced analytics that help us evaluate our team and opponents. This helps the states decide game plans, areas of improvement and test assumptions in a fashion that is informed.
  3. Thespian Involvement in Film: This will definitely become more adopted the more we use Hudl but it enables our players to access the same film as the coaches and for coaches to share movie with players exterior of practice and games. It's a helpful tool for targeted video for players.

Weaknesses

  1. Highlights are still clunky: I've spoken with the Hudl squad on this and I believe at that place are updates happening here but the Highlight and Playlist functionality is a bit clunky correct now (as of March 2017 this year). We gerry-rigged the procedure we use higher up but recall there could be improvements in the following:
    1. Tag Clips for Highlights and Playlists while Tagging: Right now you tin can either Tag stats or Cut Clips merely you tin can't exercise at the same time. This requires you to watch the game twice and is very inconvenient.
    2. Tag a Prune In one case for utilise in multiple Highlights or Playlists: If say I want cut a clip for utilise both with the unabridged squad and for a specific player playlist, I have to cut the clip twice. It'southward a existent hurting and could exist easier if in that location was a central clip repository to pull into highlights or playlists for final viewing.
    3. Playlists cannot be organized: Playlist clips are organized by the fourth dimension you add them to the playlist. There currently is no fashion to organize or move clips to a different society afterwards the fact. That's not too big of a problem with the player highlights we pull but is a trouble when showing a playlist on a specific crime or play that we want to be organized together into proficient and bad.
  2. Export Stats & Data: I'd like the ability to easily consign information from Hudl for putting into spreadsheets. I've done this through re-create and paste but would be useful to dig into information fifty-fifty farther.

The strengths of Hudl far outweigh the weaknesses as the weaknesses are nitpicks from a power user category that I doubt many would fall into. I'm not certain what we would practise without it at Saugus.

I highly recommend Hudl as it will assist y'all see your squad and games in a different lite and if you put the time in, better understand success and failure for your squad.