Duncanville HS - Duncanville, TX

Cutting Edge Recruiting

The Duncanville High School Panthers know the importance of recruiting. Year after year, top talent comes out of this North Texas high school. From Chris King (Kansas) to Darius Byrd (Texas Tech), the program consistently pushes out top college prospects. 

“Our old set-up for making highlights was a complete nightmare compared to Hudl,” said Duncanville’s assistant coach, Evan Wiatrek.

The Duncanville High School Panthers know the importance of recruiting. Year after year, top talent comes out of this North Texas high school. From Chris King (Kansas) to Darius Byrd (Texas Tech) the program consistently pushes out top college prospects.

Many recruiters stop in North Dallas to get a look at some of the best players the Metroplex has to offer. Those that can’t make it to see the Panthers players in person contact Coach Dicus and his staff weekly to get video of the team’s top recruits. Prior to Hudl, the coaching staff spent hours each week working to create, package and mail off highlights.

“Our old set-up for making highlights was a complete nightmare compared to Hudl” said Duncanville’s assistant coach, Evan Wiatrek. “At the end of the season we would create highlights only for our athletes who requested film. They would sit down in the film room with a miniDV tape and a VHS tape. As the miniDV tape was playing they would hit record on the VHS tape when the clip they wanted to add to their highlight started. Our players would go through all the games from that season and record their clips that way. With a separate tape deck we transferred VHS to DVD. The athletes would then make multiple copies of the DVD using a duplicator. As a coaching staff we would then hand mail these out to recruiters as the requests flew in.”

With Hudl, this process became much faster and much more user-friendly.

Hudl automatically creates a highlight page created for each athlete on Duncanville’s roster. Since each coach and player have access to all the game film from any computer with an internet connection – players can tag specific plays to be added to their highlight reel.

Over the season, Hudl accumulates all the athlete’s highlight clips and automatically updates a highlight reel for that athlete that spans games, seasons, and even sports.

“We stayed on our athletes all season long to get their highlights tagged,” explained Coach Wiatrek. “Now that the season is over, all of our athletes have playlists that are ready to go when recruiters ask for them.”

Coach Wiatrek and staff can quickly respond to each recruiter’s request for a highlight tape by emailing them a link directly to that athlete’s highlight reel on Hudl. Athletes like Duncanville’s running back Chris Simpson can easily share their highlights to recruiters, family, friends, or link to them from sites such as Facebook.com without having to involve their coach.

“In minutes we are able to easily make weekly team highlight videos, as well, of our previous week’s opponents to show our kids,” said Coach Wiatrek. “This is an awesome motivational tool before each of our Friday night games.”

The Duncanville staff is looking forward to utilizing the new highlight and recruiter features that just came out in the latest Hudl release. Players can now purchase the Premium Highlight feature which allows them to add music, spot shadows, and title slides to their highlight video, helping the player stand out to recruiters and look great in front of family and fans. These premium highlight videos can be burned to DVD or shared via email.

Along with the premium highlight feature, Coach Dicus and staff are looking forward to utilizing the new recruiter packages in Hudl. When a college coach contacts Coach Dicus asking for entire games for a specific player rather than just highlights, Coach Dicus can share exactly what was requested to that college recruiter directly through Hudl.

The Duncanville football team had four sophomores, eight juniors, and six seniors currently being looked at by college programs. Coach Dicus and staff would normally be overwhelmed by the large number of recruiter requests. With Hudl, instead of spending multiple hours each week this offseason meeting the demands of recruiters, the Panthers’ coaching staff is able to spend more time preparing for next season.

“The amount of time we save on a weekly basis is incredible,” said Coach Wiatrek. “We look forward to using those many extra hours to prepare for 2010.”