Text Messaging, Smart Recruitment Emails, and Athlete Video Tracking

Posted February 17, 2010 by Jon Dokulil
Under  • Features & Updates

You asked for it. You got it. Gold and Platinum Hudl partners can now send text messages with Hudl. You just need to add your players’ mobile phone number and carrier.

The off-season is our chance to really push ahead with new features, polish existing ones, and make sure coaches can get the most out of Hudl.

Although text messaging is the marquee feature for this release, there are a number of others.

Here’s what we did:

Text Messaging

Athletes live on their phones. They text and Facebook one another far more than they check email. If you want to feel confident your message will be read, texting is a good way to quickly communicate with a younger audience.

For our first attempt at this feature, we just baked it in to the Message My Team function of Hudl. Any athletes with mobile phone information will receive the message as a text. Athletes with email addresses will receive it as an email as well. If they’ve got both, they get both.

We’re releasing this feature for our Gold and Platinum partners. If you’re at Silver, consider upgrading for the upcoming season. Just let us know you want to upgrade before May 1, 2010 and we’ll knock 10% off the upgrade cost.

For this feature to work correctly, you’ll need to enter their mobile phone number and carrier information (e.g. AT&T, Verizon, Sprint, etc.) to the roster. Then just send messages as you normally would.

Let us know what you think in the comments. We’re not done with this one yet.

Smart Recruitment Emails

We interviewed several recruiters before we added functionality to Hudl to support them. But we missed something.

When recruiters receive email from systems like Hudl and they like what they see, they immediately forward the email to other recruiters and coaches. Duh.

Except it didn’t work that way with Hudl. Now it does.

Anyone who receives a recruiting package can forward it to up to ten other people.

Athlete Video Usage Tracking

We try and keep coach control and player autonomy in balance with Hudl. But how do you measure the value of coach and player efforts in Hudl without acting like “big brother”?

We think the amount of video each player is watching gives coaches an overview of player activity and answers the basic question: Are my players using Hudl?

At the same time, we don’t think this feature will weigh too heavily on the minds of athletes.