Northern Iowa’s James Pollard started with the fundamentals of game analytics. He’s built a career off it.
When James Pollard started coding basketball games the summer before his freshman year at Northern Iowa, his whole workflow came down to two buttons on a keyboard.
He knew he'd be a student manager, but he had no real idea what the role involved. So he did what a lot of ambitious managers do. He found Grow the Game on Twitter and started trying to learn from managers who were further along. The Grow the Game cohorts give student managers the chance to dive into more niche coaching roles such as data analytics.
Hudl Sportscode became his bread and butter almost immediately. And the more reps he got, the more he wanted to learn.
Today, Pollard is an assistant coach and the video coordinator at Northern Iowa under head coach Kyle Green. Pollard landed his full-time job straight out of his manager years, built on skills that started with those two buttons.
Learning the Basics
Pollard hit the same wall a lot of self-taught analysts hit: learning how to use scripting – the coding language inside Sportscode. It’s what coaches use to turn a basic box score into a genuinely useful report. He'd tried to teach it to himself with no luck. So he reached out for help.
"Getting to work specifically with Hudl reps and talk to them helped me understand the scripting language within Sportscode."
James Pollard, Assistant Coach and Video Coordinator, University of Northern Iowa Men's Basketball
It started with a simple box score. But once the language clicked, Pollard kept building more advanced reports with more situational detail. Now, Northern Iowa leans on his next-level reports daily.
Running on the Numbers
Northern Iowa runs on analytics, and Pollard is the engine. Managers live-code practice every morning, and by the time the session ends, every coach has the stats and output windows waiting on their computer. From there, Pollard spends the rest of the day going deeper - breaking down practice into the analytics that matter most to the staff. His instinct is reflexive now.
"Any time a coach has an idea or project, my first instinct is to build a code window in Sportscode to pair the video with analytical outputs," Pollard said. "We're an analytically driven program, but we want video to back it up — so I use Sportscode almost 24/7."
On the recruiting side, he's in Hudl Instat daily, pulling grassroots and high school clips. Pollard started using these tools out of curiosity. Now, they’re the daily drivers fueling his work.
Embrace Every Opportunity
Ask Pollard what he'd tell a manager on the fence about joining a cohort or diving into the tools. His answer is blunt: never say no to an opportunity.
"I wouldn't be in this spot without the skills and people I connected with through Grow the Game," Pollard said. "Be eager to learn, be a sponge, and take up every opportunity because it pays off in the long run."
A big part of that payoff is the network. As a manager, the hours are long and bandwidth is short, but connecting with managers across all 365 Division I programs gave him a constant flow of new ideas to bring to Northern Iowa.
One of those connections was Drew Evenson, now Director of Scouting Analytics at Minnesota, whom Pollard met in the cohort and still trades ideas with regularly. Evenson and Pollard both regularly share ideas and help each other grow their own games.
Now Pollard doesn’t just have the skills he needs to succeed, but the network to help him along the way.
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James Pollard is a graduate of the Grow the Game film and analytics cohort, run in partnership with Hudl. Learn more about how Hudl supports basketball programs at hudl.com/solutions/professional/basketball
