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The AD Who Carries Whatever Needs Carrying

Aug 19, 2026

4 min Read

In Bend, high school sports are the biggest game in town. Here’s how one AD runs 17 programs, and why he carries the Hudl bill so his coaches don’t have to.

Lance Haas has watched Mountain View games from some strange places — including, he'll admit, the screen in his car on the drive home from another event.

"Both hands on the wheel," he said. When you run 17 programs across three seasons, being in two places at once isn't a luxury. It's the job.

Haas is in his eighth year as athletic director at Mountain View High School in Bend, Oregon, and his tenth overall. Bend is a high-desert town with 300 days of sunshine and no college teams — which means only one thing on a Friday night.

"High school athletics is the biggest game in town," he said. "Everybody likes to support."

Whatever Needs Carrying

The grind behind those 17 programs is the part nobody sees. Organizing officials, buses, budgets, schedules built 10 to 12 months out.

But the decision Haas is proudest of didn't come off a spreadsheet. It came from the same instinct that puts a game on his windshield: carry whatever needs carrying, so somebody else doesn't have to.

When he arrived, every program at Mountain View was paying its own way onto Hudl. The invoice came broken out by sport — seven thousand dollars for football, twenty-five hundred for basketball, on down the line, which meant, in practice, that coaches were fundraising to cover the essentials they needed to do their jobs.

That didn't sit right with Haas. "Our coaches shouldn't have to fundraise to get the stats and video they need," he said. "Our fundraised dollars should go back to the kids, not to a platform we need for scouting and coaching. That's my job. Take that off their plate."

So he did. The athletic department picked up the whole bill for every program, putting the entire department on one system.

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Shielding the Coaches

His football coach knew what he was getting. When Brian Crum sat on the committee that hired Haas eight years ago, he was asked what he wanted in an athletic director. "The hardest worker," Crum recalled. "Somebody who's ahead of the deal." And somebody who could shield a coach from the red tape and the budget fights so the coach could go coach.

Crum got it. "He's a godsend for me," he said. "He keeps the frustrating things on his end so I don't have to deal with them."

Picking up the Hudl bill was the purest version of that, and for Crum the math was immediate. "Now think about what I can spend with that money," he says. "That's better helmets. That's better shoulder pads. That's feeding our kids every time we travel."

His advice to any athletic director still leaving the invoice on a coach's desk is blunt: "You're shortchanging your program. Take it off their table, pick up that bill, and let them coach."

What the coaches do with the tool, once it's paid for, is teach. Crum films everything with their Focus cameras. Every practice, every level, from a fixed angle two yards outside the tackle box so his linemen can study their own hand placement and footwork by the next morning.

Mountain View doesn't always have the most talent in town, he says, and it doesn't need to. "[Hudl has] let us not just level the playing field, but advance over the top of it."

"I use Hudl as an AD in all kinds of ways. It takes care of a lot of things, so I can focus on the behind-the-scenes for our programs." Lance Haas, Athletic Director, Mountain View HS

Where Film Obsession Leads

You can watch the whole sequence of events — the bill Haas absorbed, the money Crum freed up, the film the kids actually study — lead into a single player named Jettson Gillam.

A junior tight end, six foot four, two-sport all-state, Gillam is the most film-obsessed athlete Crum has coached in thirty years. "He's on Hudl the whole time," Crum said. "If I haven't posted practice film within an hour, I get a text: 'Coach, where are the notes?'"

That obsession has a destination. "I've gone from no offers, no ranking, no stars," Gillam said, "to being the seventh-ranked player in Oregon with three Division I offers.

Without Hudl, I didn't think any of that would be possible."

He cut the highlight tape himself; the platform put it in front of coaches across the country. On big nights his family lights up his phone from wherever they are, and he'll come off the field to thirty texts.

Where It All Starts

Gillam knows the tape is only the end of the line. "It means everything that Lance and Brian support me and my teammates like this," he said. "That's kind of where it all starts for us."

He's already thinking about the kids behind him. Mountain View, he points out, isn't the biggest school in town. "But they can look up to me and know that if I can get out of here, they can too."

Somewhere upstream of that sentence is a man who decided a bill was his to carry.

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