One System, Every Sport: How IWCC Stopped Piecing It Together

Shane Larson has been in small college athletics long enough to know exactly what it costs.

Not just the budget line items. The other costs. 

The coach who burns out by year three because 90 percent of the job is administrative and 10 percent is the reason they got into coaching in the first place. The program that makes do with outdated tools because the resources were never distributed evenly to begin with. The AD who spends half his week managing vendor contracts instead of building something.

Larson knows that world because he came up through it. He drove buses. He stretched budgets. He learned to work within limitations that everyone around him had simply accepted as the cost of doing business at the small college level.

As the athletic director at Iowa Western Community College, he decided to stop accepting them.

Twenty-Six Sports. One Problem.

It started, as a lot of things do, with a budget audit.

Larson sat down to map out what Iowa Western was actually spending on technology across the athletic department — who had what, who was paying for what, and whether any of it made sense. What he found surprised even him.

“We were like, man, I did not realize we were spending this much money on three different providers and 15 different packages," he said. 

Twenty-one coaches. Twenty-six sports. And a technology infrastructure that had been built one contract at a time, program by program, with no coherent system underneath it.

The bigger issue wasn't the cost. It was what the fragmentation was doing to the department. Football had resources. Basketball had resources. And then, somewhere down the line, the sports that didn't generate much revenue were making do — cobbling together workflows, going without tools their athletes deserved, getting a different experience than the programs that happened to sit at the top of the budget priority list.

Larson saw it as an equity problem as much as an efficiency problem. And he set out to fix both.

The Real Opponent

Every coach on Larson's staff was fighting a version of the same battle. The opponent wasn't the other team. It was the clock.

Men's soccer coach Mike Brown was waiting three to five days for match data — days when a correction could have already been made. Men's basketball coach Andy Shaw will tell you that going into a game without film on your opponent is one of the worst feelings in coaching. Softball coach Heidi Jordan was up until midnight reviewing games by hand. Football coach Scott Strohmeier was charting plays until 2 a.m. — down and distance, formation, defense — one play at a time.

Multiply that across 26 sports and the picture gets clear. The manual grind wasn't a quirk of one program. It was the operating condition of the entire department. And it was stealing time from the one thing every one of those coaches came to Iowa Western to do.

The Decision

The turning point wasn't a product demo. It was a decision Larson made about what kind of athletic department he wanted to run.

The answer was the Hudl athletic department package — one contract, one platform, every sport. 
Film, automated cameras, streaming, data, recruiting tools. All of it, department-wide, under a single system built for programs exactly like Iowa Western's.

When he ran the numbers, the math surprised him. "We figured out it was actually cheaper for us to give these resources to every program than what we were paying for the seven or eight programs that had individual contracts," he said.

But the more important calculation wasn't financial. It was cultural. If softball and dance team had the same access to tools as football, basketball and soccer, something shifted in what it meant to be a coach and athlete at Iowa Western. The athletic department package made that possible without asking Larson to choose who got access and who didn't.

Associate AD Ian Alumbaugh had been the skeptic in the room. The manager of gameday operations and an old-school media guy, he wasn't convinced that Hudl Focus cameras could replace a person behind the lens. "These automated cameras aren't going to do what a person behind the camera can do," he said. 

Then he tested one. "I was quickly proven wrong." 

By January, he had the entire baseball and softball streaming schedule set — games that would go live automatically, without a filmer to schedule or a battery to charge. "January, February, March, April, May — that I don't have to worry about the live stream going live at that game time."

His conviction flipped entirely. "If you're not using it, you're behind," he said. "Automated cameras are the new norm."

What the Time Buys

The efficiency gains were real. But Larson will tell you that was never really the point.

The package gave every coach the same foundation — a platform to upload, review, and share film, automated cameras to capture it, and Assist to break it down. What they did with that time was up to them.

For Brown, it changed the dynamic in the film room entirely. Instead of waiting days for data and spending nights manually building a scouting report, he had the film and the breakdown ready when he needed it. 

"When I had the film and the data to back it up, it's not me versus them. It's me with them," he said. That shift changed his program. A player who could have transferred to Division I after his first season looked at what Iowa Western had built and decided to stay.

With Focus cameras capturing every practice and game automatically, and automatic breakdowns from Assist, the turnaround that used to take days now took minutes.  Strohmeier's practice film was cut and ready before his staff finished breakfast. 

Shaw's players could pull up game film ten minutes after the final whistle. Jordan's athletes were back in the dorms clipping their own swings and sending them to coaches that same night. "Assist is a dream come true for us," Jordan said. "Because now we actually get some sleep."

And Larson started seeing something he'd been working toward: coaches who didn't feel defeated before they walked in the door. "When 90 percent of your job is the part you don't like, and only 10 percent is the part you like — that's when you see burnout," he said. "I want to flip that."

A Big-Time Feel at a Two-Year School

There's one more piece of the Iowa Western story that doesn't show up in a budget line.

Streaming.

Focus cameras eliminated the student-filmer problem and turned every Iowa Western game into a broadcast — and the audience turned out to be bigger than anyone expected. Alumbaugh pulled the numbers and found Iowa Western was getting more international views than domestic ones. "A girl from Brazil will have 25 different family members watching every game," Larson said.

For women's soccer coach Bruce Erikson, whose roster is largely international, streaming isn't a nice-to-have. "When you have half your roster that are international kids, you can go two years and not see a parent in person," he said. "Video and data can sometimes be a more universal language."

Strohmeier framed what all of it adds up to: "We have a full broadcast — play by play — to give it a big-time feel. Yes, we're a junior college. But from our facilities to someone watching it on their TV, it is a big-time feel."

That's what Larson built. Not a D1 program in miniature. Something specific to what Iowa Western is — a two-year school with a two-year window to develop an athlete, change a trajectory, send someone somewhere better than where they started.

"This is the same analytic technology that they use in Major League Baseball," Larson said. "You start telling the kid that — they're not looking at it as an inferior experience."

They're looking at it as Iowa Western.

The coaches put it differently.

Strohmeier's version is simple: "Let's get our work done. Let's go home. I want my coaches to be able to watch their kids' volleyball games."

Women's basketball head coach Zach Loll, who has coached at other programs, notices the difference every morning. "I've walked in to work at different places and felt defeated before I even step in the door," he said. "And here you step in the door and you kind of smile."

One system. Twenty-six sports. And finally, enough room to coach.