Fixing the Problems Nobody Sees in the Strawberry Fields
Aug 13, 2026
4 min Read
By Caleb Bacon
Chris Ruffinelli runs a 70-hour week putting out fires nobody sees at Rio Mesa. With Hudl, he can finally be everywhere his sports are at once.
The two buses were never supposed to arrive at the same time.
They had left from two different schools, both bound for a pair of playoff games at Rio Mesa High School on the same afternoon. They rolled through the gate together, a hundred teenagers spilling out at once.
Behind them came the officials for both games. Then a text from the baseball coach: he'd forgotten to print the ground rules, could someone run off four copies. And the softball officials still needed a ride across campus.
Chris Ruffinelli handled all of it in the minutes before the first pitches were thrown, exactly at the time they were supposed to. "Nobody knew any of that was going on," he said. Which, to him, is the whole point.
"My philosophy is that I should make my coaches' job as easy as possible. There are a lot of fires my coaches don't even know happened,” he said.
Just another day in the life of a high school athletic director.
The School in the Strawberry Fields
Ruffinelli is the AD at Rio Mesa, which sits in the middle of four strawberry fields. This is El Rio, an unincorporated stretch of Ventura County, California, where the campus resembles a town square: 1,800 students, more than 900 of them playing something.
He runs it on 70 to 80-hour weeks, and he holds himself to one rule that sounds simple until you try to keep it.
"Everybody thinks football is the biggest thing," he said. "My job is to treat every single sport equal."
Seven Places at Once
On a given Tuesday night there might be seven venues lit up at once, and there is one of him. On a Friday, he'll spend three-quarters of a Rio Mesa football game running it rather than watching it. "I can't split myself seven ways," he said.
For most of his career, that meant the JV soccer match and the freshman volleyball game and the wrestling meet simply happened without him. Witnessed, but not by the person whose whole job is to see everyone.
The cameras changed that. Rio Mesa runs Hudl Focus cameras in its venues now, and Ruffinelli has learned to be in two places he isn't.
"I'll be in the football stadium watching our girls soccer game," he said, "and pull up the girls basketball game in the gym on my phone at the same time."
The proof shows up the next morning, in a hallway. He'll stop a player — nice shot in the fourth quarter last night, that was clutch — and watch the confusion cross her face.
"Coach, you weren't there."
"I was there," he’d say. "I was watching the livestream."
"As an athletic director, Hudl's a huge resource I'm using daily. It makes my job easier."
Chris Ruffinelli, Athletic Director, Rio Mesa HS
Finally Looking Up
The change most of El Rio can feel, though, happens at the gate, and for that story you have to talk to Gina Erickson. Erickson is the athletic department's bookkeeper and a Rio Mesa graduate who, in her own words, bleeds red and black.
She also used to carry the night's cash, sometimes briefcases of it, back to her office at 9:30, through a building that hadn't yet been rewired for decent lighting. "You never know when somebody's watching you," she said.
She couldn't safely count it alone that late, so she'd come back on a Saturday with her husband or her sister, someone to verify the tally. Worse were the nights fans pressed cash on her in the card-only line until her pockets were stuffed with it. "If somebody from the state had seen me, I could have lost my job."
When Ruffinelli moved to Hudl Ticketing, all of that fell away — the deposits post on their own, the reports break down by sport. What Erickson noticed wasn't the accounting, though. It was that she finally got to look up.
"It's so much easier to interact with people when you're not counting back change," she said. "I've run into people I went to school with, in line to watch their alma mater play. I get to look them in the eye and actually have a conversation."
The woman who once guarded the cash now works the front of the gate, greeting her old classmates as they come in.
Ask Ruffinelli why he does the job and the answer has nothing to do with reach or revenue. It's smaller. It's the golf cart.
Most afternoons, once the fires are out, he drives it past the practice fields to wherever a game is being played, and he sits, and he watches.
"That's the funnest part of my day," he said. For a man who has built a career out of being everywhere at once, the reward turns out to be the one place he finally gets to just be. Parked at the edge of a strawberry field, watching Rio Mesa’s athletes play, seen by no one, seeing all of it.
