The Commissioner Who Won't Let His High Schools Go Out of Sight

A Second Job and a Calling

Al Carbone will be the first to tell you he isn't an athletic director. Although he has led the Southern Connecticut Conference — a 23-school league stretched across greater New Haven — since 2004, it is his second job. His main job is at a utility company. He runs the SCC on nights and weekends. But despite it being his second gig, promoting high school sports has turned into his calling.

If you ask Carbone what keeps him up at night, he won’t say scheduling or budgets. He says the same thing every time: what's the next good idea to be better than everyone else?

Carbone is relentless in making sure that his high schools get noticed. He believes that high school sports only matter if they can be seen

"When you're out of sight, you're out of touch," Carbone said. "And no one cares." The way he defines his whole job, it comes down to making sure the SCC is never out of sight.

The Summer Silence

Carbone’s biggest challenge is the summer silence, when school ends and high school sports risk disappearing from view. With student-athletes focused on travel teams and college commitments, only the programs that actively promote their schedules, highlights and stories during the summer months stay ahead. Recognizing how difficult this is for busy athletic directors, Carbone leads by example.

When participation dropped in a recent "best of" league contest—yielding just 300 votes despite the league claiming 30 state championships—Carbone personally rallied his schools. His message was clear: be remarkable, create engaging content, and start building excitement long before the season begins.

One League, One Ticket

When Carbone wants something done, he goes first. He was an early adopter of Hudl Ticketing across the SCC, and he didn't poll the other leagues before he jumped. 

"I'm a lone wolf," he said. "I wanted to be first." 

He'd used another platform before and asked them to make a few small changes, such as accommodations for senior citizens. He was told no. When he brought the same requests to Hudl, He quickly got a yes. He'd spent a decade asking a national body to let him set up a single league-level account so his schools could run ticketing together. They never could. Hudl did. Now the whole conference runs on it. 

The Rebate Debate

Every ticket sold through Hudl sends a rebate back to the school — and across a league selling well over ten thousand tickets a year, that adds up fast. So fast that Carbone can’t understand why other people are missing out. When ADs bring up the cost of ticketing,  Carbone points them the other way: Sell your tickets and the rebate alone knocks a real number off the bill. Then there's the revenue most schools never touch — pay-per-view on a playoff game, a sponsor's logo on a free live stream, a local business's name on the ticket itself. Carbone’s next project is putting the league's corporate sponsors on every broadcast and every ticket the SCC sells.

It's the case he makes to every AD who'll listen

Telling the Story

For Carbone, Hudl is only the doorway. What he's really after is the story. His league streams graduations, honor society inductions, and banquets for retiring coaches, so the people who couldn't be there could still watch. Grandparents who moved to Florida catch their grandkids' games from the couch. In a conference as large and varied as his, Carbone treats the technology as the great equalizer: everyone gets to be seen.

And he's built a small army to help. This year he has six students working as interns — going to games with microphones, cutting highlights, running the social accounts. Last year two of them helped grow the league's Instagram following by 3,000. Kids cut their own highlights off the Hudl film and post them before they've left the gym. Carbone's job is to make sure all of it points back to the high school experience. If the schools can’t tell that story, nobody can.