Dr. Dominic Ingram takes 20,000 steps a game doing the work no one sees, so his coaches can coach. Then he turns Hudl’s rebate into something they keep forever.
It was weeks after the state championship before Curt Weeks sat down to watch the film.
The Tuscaloosa County High School boys won it at Legacy Arena in Birmingham in the run that lit up their hometown of Northport. Weeks, the head basketball coach, came home to 782 text messages, and only when things finally slowed down did he cue up the game to study it.
He studies everything against a code he calls the Wildcat Way. It’s made of four tenets — maximum effort, be a great teammate, complete confidence, even keel.
He found the Wildcat Way, personified, down near the floor. There was his athletic director, Dr. Dominic Ingram, in a suit spinning a towel over his head, completely overcome. Maximum effort, complete confidence — two of the four things Weeks preaches to his players. And then the hardest one: even keel.
"He didn't overdo it," Weeks said. "He didn't take his jacket off." Without meaning to, Ingram had lived the whole ethos back to the coach that invented it.
All In, Out of the Way
That is more or less how Ingram operates. All in, and out of the way. Formerly the assistant principal and athletic director at Tuscaloosa County, he came up to the job from the feeder middle school, where he learned early that his role was to hold the ladder for other people.
Ask him what he does that goes unnoticed, though, and he reaches for the least visible thing he can find.
"A lot of the background work," he said. "I want my coaches to spend as much time focusing on the kids as they can, rather than dealing with small, minor issues."
Easier Saturday Mornings
His football coach can measure it. Cris Bell has worked for a lot of athletic directors across a long career. "He's the most thorough I've ever been around, dotted all the i's, crossed all the t's," Bell said. "It takes so much off our plate that, honestly, you could almost get lazy."
He means it as the highest compliment a coach can pay. "Coaches want to coach. We're not in it for the paperwork."
Bell has been at this long enough to know what that relief is worth. He started out on 16-millimeter film, cutting and splicing it by hand; as a young coach he'd give up a Saturday morning and a night's sleep to drive two or three hours, meet a rival halfway and swap videotape.
The last time he did it, around 2011, they'd at least advanced to handing over a portable hard drive. Now the film moves on its own from their Hudl Focus cameras, tagged and sorted and searchable, six defensive fronts he can call up with a click in Hudl.
"It spoils an old guy like me," he said.
"On game day I'm in fifty million places. I don't get to see much in real time, so I go back and review the footage [on Hudl] the next morning."
Dr. Dominic Ingram, Former Athletic Director + Assistant Principal, Tuscaloosa County HS
Twenty Thousand Steps
The work Bell doesn't see is most of Ingram's Friday.
Ingram’s day starts before dawn, setting up security around the stadium; from there it's the press box to check the cameras and the stream, then a pep rally, the ticket boxes, the officials at the gate, and finally the game itself. He spends it not watching, but working, rotating through the stands and hunting the next problem before it becomes one.
Fifteen to twenty thousand steps, by his count. Ingram runs game day off one system — the cameras, the tickets, the streams and the back office, which is the only way one man can be everywhere at once.
He watches his own team the way a grandparent three states away does: the next morning, on Hudl.
The Wildcat Way
For Weeks, that same Hudl footage is where the Wildcat Way stops being a slogan. His players don't break down a game by the scoreboard; they pull up the clips and grade themselves against the four components.
Did I sprint the floor? Was I a good teammate? Did I play with confidence? Did I stay even keel?
"We don't really talk about the score," Weeks said. "We talk about the process, and how it all ties into Hudl."
Visible in the Shadow
Tuscaloosa County plays in a competitive neighborhood. National powers Hoover and Thompson are down the road, and the University of Alabama is quite literally across the river.
Ingram uses Hudl to keep a mid-size school visible in their shadow. He is a data guy by nature: spray charts at the baseball and softball fields, play charts for the hardwood, and a cleaner, steadier camera than the volatile one they used to fight with, which he'll tell you made the games better to watch for everyone in the stands.
The highlights travel, the livestream travels, and the views, he tells the people above him, "put Tuscaloosa County on the map."
But the thing Ingram does with what comes back, the Hudl Ticketing rebate, the money the streams bring in, is the thing that tells you about him.
When a Tuscaloosa County team wins a state title, and lately both baseball and basketball have, he doesn't quietly fold the money into a budget line. He buys trophies. Replica state championship trophies, cut in the shape of the blue map of Alabama, one for every player, manager, and coach.
"I want them to have a piece of that history," Ingram said. "Something they can put on the trophy case at home to show what they've done."
He will never be the name on any of them. That is the job, and it is the way he likes it. The man who stood in the stands overcome and kept his jacket on, now quietly handing each kid a piece of Alabama to carry home.
