South Walton is a string of beach towns with no town center, so the school became one. Here’s how its AD is broadcasting the whole community to the world.
Phil Tisa has been the head football coach at South Walton High School for fourteen years, and its athletic director for just as long.
Those are the two jobs people know about. The one that surprises them is the third. Every summer, Tisa builds the master class schedule for the entire school. "I don't think people would ever guess that's something an athletic director would do," he said.
He has worn a lot of hats here, for a long time — twenty-one years, going back to when there was barely a school to run. South Walton opened in 2002, and Tisa was there early enough to help build it.
"I don't think a lot of people get that opportunity," he said. He’s been building it ever since.
Where South Walton Gathers
South Walton isn't a traditional city or town. It's a string of beach communities along the Florida panhandle with no town hall and no community center. This leaves exactly one building where everyone can gather.
"This school is the community center," said principal Nina Borthwick. "There's no other option for a gym, an auditorium, a stage. It's here." The trouble is getting to it. "We're an island, I'd like to say," she said. "It's hard to just get here in 30 minutes."
Tisa's real job, underneath all the others, is pulling a scattered community around the one thing it shares.
For years his best tool for that has been Hudl. A big reason why one person can carry it all is because it runs on one system.
Livestreaming came first, and Borthwick describes what it did in a fisherman's terms. "It created a cast net," she said. "Everyone could watch and zoom in and follow the sports. They got hooked."
Tisa moved the rest of the school's life onto the same Hudl platform: tickets, schedules, prom, and this year, for the first time, graduation. The calls he used to field — where's the game, what time does it start — mostly stopped.
"We send people to our Hudl Fan page and they find all of it," he said. "And if they can't make it, they find the livestream."
"Hudl has made my life as an AD a thousand times easier."
Phil Tisa, Athletic Director, South Walton HS
Tickets Pay for the Platform
Running the department isn’t free, which for a small athletic department poses a challenge. "We get $500 that pays for buses," said Steve Nobel, who counsels students, coaches football and runs the girls lacrosse program. "That's it. We fund everything else."
So Tisa did the math on the gate. South Walton sold 54,000 tickets through Hudl this year, and with the Hudl Ticketing rebate, those sales should land around $40,000 — roughly enough, he figured, to cover the department's Hudl cost outright.
"That makes it pretty much null and void for our programs," he says. The tickets pay for the platform that sells the tickets.
Borthwick has watched the streaming change something subtler, too, in how the school carries itself. When the games go out to the world, she tells her athletes, the world is watching.
"Everything you wear that has a Seahawk on it represents our school," she said. "When it's cast to millions of viewers, they're watching everything you do. Win or lose, you do it the right way."
A Hudl Focus camera, it turns out, is a decent enforcer of culture.
The School, Front and Center
For Tisa, all of it was only ever in service of afternoons like one this spring. South Walton's baseball team won the state championship, the program's first, after three trips to the final.
The coach who got them there was Coach Borthwick, the principal's husband, and he won it alongside his own son, Coleman. "As a human being," Tisa said, "that one just hits you right in the heart."
Then the team came home. In a community with no town square to gather in, the people found the next best thing: they showed up and met the bus as it rolled back into town.
It is exactly the thing Tisa has spent twenty-one years and a closetful of hats trying to make possible. A scattered set of beach towns, for one night, in one place, around one team.
"Anything we can do," he said, "to put South Walton and our student athletes front and center. We couldn't ask for anything more."
