The goal still comes down to allowing coaches to share video to staff and players, using the tools within the Hudl platform to pull out highlights, mark up video and make notes along the way. With about 98 percent of all high schools working with Hudl for at least one sport, 29 of 30 NBA teams, two-thirds of MLS teams and half the NHL, not to mention every single team in the English Premier League, most of Bundesliga, La Liga, Chinese Basketball Association and Super Rugby, Hudl is growing worldwide, at a variety of levels. Hudl’s growth has included acquiring companies worldwide to keep up with demand, giving them 20 different global offices, but with the company still based in Lincoln. Hudl works with 160,000 teams across the globe in over 35 sports and their team of employees has been built up to handle sport needs and be available to teams on site. In one year, Hudl grew from 12 high school teams to 350.
Hudl started to work on a multi-sport solution, making the product work for volleyball, basketball, lacrosse and even wrestling and track and field. So, for fall 2008 Hudl piloted with 12 high school partners, mostly in Nebraska and Kansas and one in Texas. By streamlining the process and allowing coaches to take video from their own cameras and put it into the Hudl system, growth was possible. high schools - Graff knew he needed to find a way to go cloud based (a rarity for the time) and stop relying on servers installed on site using Hudl cameras. To make Hudl accessible to the masses - i.e. Hudl moved into indoor sports, such as volleyball with some of its newest technology. “We expedited the process a lot faster for the players.” “I thought it gave our players an edge to look at things like we did at Nebraska very quickly,” Callahan says. But they needed to grow.Ĭallahan helped make that happen, introducing Graff to multiple people in the industry, while championing the ability to make information more accessible. With the new Nebraska coach, Bo Pelini, keeping Nebraska as a client, Hudl now had Nebraska and the Jets. “It was a scary time for us,” Graff says, “but we learned a critical lesson about how the coaching community is very tight.”Ĭallahan soon landed with the NFL’s New York Jets and one of his first moves was to pitch Hudl to the staff there. They put a focus on football, getting the product ready for Nebraska with plans to expand within Division I football.īut the Hudl teamed learned a valuable lesson when after one year with Nebraska using their product, Callahan was out as coach. Streaming that was a huge part.”Īs the co-founders continued to build Hudl, they were winning business plan competitions, helping bootstrap the company. He cited the 20-hour rule in college football that limited a coach’s contacts with players for practice and meetings and says Hudl was a way to circumvent the rule while getting information to players, letting them see practice film, cutups, playbooks, scripts, “whatever information we had we could transport it to the player immediately. “I believe it was at the forefront of the technology out there are the time,” says Callahan, now the offensive line coach for the Cleveland Browns.
Hudl started in football, but quickly learned it needed to expand into sports across the globe. A conversation with Callahan about what was needed led Graff and his co-founders to realize that in the age of 20 - an age when people were still scared of online banking and using video to help coach still often included printing screen shots on paper - they knew the best way forward was finding an opportunity to capture video, index it and make it sharable to players, whether they were in the facility or not.
At the same time, Nebraska’s newly hired football coach, Bill Callahan, upped the data requests to staff. While working with the Nebraska sports information department as a student, Graff was tapped into the current technology for Nebraska in 2005. Raikes School of Computer Science and Management, a unique program focused on teaching students both the technical side of computer science and the business side at the same time, used this perspective to keep his entrepreneurial interests in mind. The three Hudl cofounders met while at Nebraska.
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