All Sports Culture

From App Chaos to 90-Second Accounting with Hudl Registration

Nov 10, 2026

4 min Read

By Caleb Bacon

Tony Watkins knew Venmo wasn’t the right place for team fees. With Hudl Registration, he can see who’s paid in seconds, no business office reports required.

Tony Watkins can do the math on a football program’s fees in his sleep.

“If you’ve got a football program that’s charging $500, $700 apiece, you can have a parent with $30,000, $40,000 in an account,” he said. “That’s just not best practices.”

Watkins, athletic director at Holy Innocents’ Episcopal School in Atlanta, knows because that’s how it used to work. Two years ago, team fees came in through parents’ Venmo accounts. No money went missing that he knows of. But he knew the setup wasn’t built to last.

These days, Watkins has an easier way to navigate his perpetual to-do list. Basketball fees for seventh grade through varsity. Wrestling. Collecting money for his school’s teams used to be a chain of links, reports and rosters. Now it’s done through Hudl Registration, and checking who has paid takes about 90 seconds.

Here’s how an athletic director in his eighth year at the helm got there, and what he’d tell any AD still collecting fees the old way.

The Venmo Years

Nothing about the old system was reckless. It was just a lot to carry.

Parents collected money from other parents. That meant families chasing families for payment, and it got awkward fast when a student was on financial aid. “We also don’t want parents being the bill collector,” Watkins said. Confidentiality was a concern, too.

So Holy Innocents’ moved to payment links run through the school’s business office. That was better, but not simple. Each link had to be requested. Financial aid students needed their own. Cross country needed variations for seniors, juniors and freshmen.

Then came the paperwork. Watkins would email families, wait for them to pay, then ask the business office for a report whenever staff had time. From there, he sorted the results and ran them against a roster. It was, in his words, “very time consuming.”

The business office didn’t want to handle athletic fees, either. “And I don’t want them to,” Watkins added. “I want us to be able to do that.”

"It’s very convenient. Customer service is really good. It has solved 100% of our challenges with accepting money. The convenience fee is plenty fair. I don’t want to accept money any other way." Tony Watkins, Athletic Director, Holy Innocents Episcopal School (GA)

Accounting in Ninety Seconds

The nudge came from a friend. Sam Lialios, Watkins’ former associate AD and now the athletic director at Mount Pisgah, asked if he’d seen what Hudl was doing for team dues. Watkins hadn’t. He decided to try it.

A quick email from the Hudl team got him started. A little trial and error followed, mostly figuring out where everything went. He added account codes so the business office would know where each payment should land. “I’m pretty savvy on apps,” he said. “I can typically figure it out.”

The payoff showed up fast.

“It’s made it easy for me to see who’s paid and who hasn’t,” Watkins said. When a family needs financial aid, he sends them a discount code. When someone is having a hard time, he handles it directly. His emails invite those families to reach out, and he works with them one on one.

Watkins has gotten about five emails in total from parents. No complaints. “No response is a great response,” he said. “If I’m not getting any negative feedback, they log in, then that means we’re cooking.”

The Newest Chapter

Registration is the newest piece of a longer story. Watkins has been at Holy Innocents’ for 18 years, and the school has used Hudl in some capacity for the bulk of them. It’s a big operation. About 80% of its upper and middle school students play at least one sport, across 20-plus programs.

Lialios helped lead the push for an athletic department package a few years back. Cameras went up on fields and in gyms, including portable Hudl Focus Flex units. Livestreaming followed, and it’s now in its third year.

Different sports lean on different tools. Football and basketball use film and stats. Baseball gets livestreamed. Registration, though, isn’t limited to any one of them. “Every sport will be [using Registration],” Watkins said. They’ll run it from basketball to cross country, swim to esports.

Today, there’s a camera at every field and gym the school plays in. Grandparents watch from around the world. “You log on to the Golden Bear Network,” he said. “You can watch whatever the heck we got going on that day.”

Watkins ties it all together: the cameras, the livestreams and now Registration have “improved what we do tremendously.”

What He’d Tell Other ADs

So what would Watkins say to an athletic director who hasn’t tried Hudl Registration yet?

“I would tell them it’s very convenient,” he said. “Customer service is really good. It has solved 100% of our challenges with accepting money. The convenience fee is plenty fair. I don’t want to accept money any other way.”

Now he has 20-plus programs’ worth of fees to collect, and none of the old paperwork.

Sam’s call changed how Watkins collects money. Now he’s passing the message along.

See how Hudl Registration works.