Meet your club’s new best friend—Hudl. But like any friendship, you need to set a foundation. It’ll take some planning, patience and persistence.
To help you and your team get to know Hudl, we created ten goals to focus on. Like getting parents on board, and creating highlights to get your team and players noticed. Each goal is paired with a game plan full of tactics you can use to reach that objective.
In the end, everyone at your club will be more aligned and ready to get the most out of Hudl’s tools. In other words, that friendship will be rock solid for years to come.
Ready to dive in? Keep scrolling to see the first goal.
Commitment—/kəˈmɪtmənt/ (noun): the state or quality of being dedicated to a cause, activity, etc. Let’s go ahead and add team to that definition. After all, you’ve made a commitment to your team by signing up for Hudl (high-five).
So what’s the driving motivation behind your decision to add Hudl to your team? Maybe you want to use Hudl to find insights into your team’s performance more easily and efficiently. Or you signed up so your athletes have access to tools that allow them to create highlights in seconds, get noticed and have a chance at the next level. Is it because you want to help build your organization’s brand and attract more athletes to your club? If so, you’re on the right track—you’ve already shown that you’re committed to helping your athletes and teams be the best they can be.
It’s time to share those motivations with your coaches and set expectations early. For example:
From there, it’s a cascading effect. A committed coach can set expectations with their team managers, athletes and parents so every single person at the club (regardless of role) knows how and why they need to get the most out of Hudl.
But let’s not get too ahead of ourselves. First we’ll need to get your coaches bought in. Here’s the game plan.
Don’t forget to share the expectations and rallying cry with everyone (assistants, parents, directors, etc.). Create a snazzy PowerPoint presentation, Google document, or host a meeting so you can talk about it in person. Everyone needs to be on the same page for this season to be a success.
Hudl is a great tool for teams—but it’s extremely powerful on the individual level too. Parents can watch matches they might not be able to attend. Or they can send their son or daughter’s highlights to extended family members. And athletes? They can review video on their own to improve off the pitch, then create and share highlights to social media. And everyone can stay in touch with our messaging tools.
Let’s talk about how you can let these people know they have access to Hudl, what it can do and how you expect athletes to use it this season. Here’s the game plan.
Note: We don’t currently offer parent accounts. If you have parents that want access to log in to watch video, have them use their athlete’s account.
We know it can be a serious struggle to film your matches. But good quality video is extremely important. So we’re going to give you the know-how you need.
You might be wondering why having excellent video is so important. It’s because of the impact it has on your post-match review and your ability to create highlights. Whether you plan to track stats yourself or send your matches to Hudl Assist, the video has to be clear enough to show what happened and who was involved.
Here’s the game plan.
Check out our Hudl Academy course to learn more about why it all starts with video.
You have all these tools at your disposal—video, stats, highlights, playlists (we could go on and on). Now it’s time to learn how to use them. Here are a couple of ideas that’ll help everyone at your club become a Hudl pro.
Coaches
Parents and athletes
Practice #1: Talk about how to log in, download the Hudl app, update account information, edit your profile, and where to find tutorials or support resources.
Practice #2: How to save top moments and create highlight reels.
Practice #3: Go over the steps to share highlights or embed a highlight reel (like for your club’s website).
Practice #4: The types of messages they should send and how to view them.
By studying video and stats together, you can learn a lot about your team’s performance. With them linked together on Hudl, it’s easier than ever to find the exact moments in the match you want to see. No more shuffling through 20-90 minutes of video to find that one shot you’re looking for.
Sounds awesome, but how long will it take? Glad you asked. There are three ways to track stats on Hudl—and they’re all easy. You just have to decide which method works best for your team.
Pro tip: If you plan on tracking stats live at the match, create a spreadsheet and have people volunteer for a match or an entire tournament (just like you did for filming).
Cool, I have stats for my matches. What now? We’ll take it from here. All that data is automatically linked to the moment in your video when it happened. Done and done. Now here’s your game plan to easily find and share key moments for review.
To learn more about data, check out our stats course in Hudl Academy.
Video is a key factor in player development and athletes are craving it. We surveyed nearly 1,000 club athletes across the country to make sure, and guess what? 86 percent of them think reviewing video is crucial for their improvement.
When you need to create a team culture of video review, it’s best to make it a habit. And to do that, you need to set a cadence. Here’s your game plan for making the most of your team’s video review sessions.
For more ideas on how to make your video review more efficient, check out 8 creative ideas to improve your team film review.
As a coach, your success is determined by more than wins and losses. It’s your job to create well-rounded players with correct technique and the ability to make smart decisions on the pitch. We know you’re under pressure—your players’ (and your club’s) futures are on the line.
It doesn’t help that time with players is often limited. Mom picks them up from practice and sends them off to the next school activity, tutoring session or piano lesson on their calendar.
But that’s where Hudl can help (maybe that was even your motivation behind adding it in the first place). Video ensures learning doesn’t end at practice—it gives you a chance to connect with your players off the field.
Let’s talk about your game plan, which includes tips on how to encourage individual film sessions and build a team-wide obsession with video.
Get more tips on how to review and share video with your team.
Remember how we talked about your motivation back in the first tactic? Good—time to reference it. If you want to use Hudl to market your club or to celebrate your team’s best moments, listen up.
Here comes your game plan for highlights—how often you’ll create them, who will create them, where will they be shared, and what they should include.
Want the full rundown on highlights? Check out our highlights and recruiting course in Hudl Academy. You’ll learn the different ways to find top moments (spoiler alert: they’re super easy to locate with stats) and save them as highlights.
If you coach an older club team, chances are pretty good that you have more than one player with high hopes of playing in college. So let’s say you’ve already beefed up your tournament schedule for the season to give them a better chance of getting noticed by college recruiters.
But it’s a crowded field. College coaches have packed schedules and simply can’t watch every player at a tournament. If an athlete hopes to get on their radar, he or she must be able to grab the coach’s attention before a tournament and make them want to see more in person. An email alone won’t be able to do that. But an email with a linked highlight? Now we’re talking.
Even if you coach U14 and have players who just want to send their best plays from the season to their grandma, you’ll probably need to know how it all works so you can teach your team. Good thing it’s super easy! Here’s your game plan.
Want to learn more about the recruiting process from a former Division I soccer coach? Check out our online class, the Inside Scoop on Recruiting. Bryan Amos covers it all, from the research every prospect should do to the importance of eye-catching highlights.
What are your team’s goals? Every coach in the country could probably answer this question. But we bet the answers would be really different. Some closely track specific initiatives and put a high value on success. Others set lofty expectations at a preseason team meeting and rarely reference them again. So why does every team spend (at least a little) time on goals?
Because goals are powerful. Challenging yet attainable objectives can help everyone level up and stay on the same page throughout the season. When you’re all working towards the same purpose, there’s a better chance you’ll succeed.
But where to begin? How can you figure out what your goals should be? That’s where we come in. We’ll guide you through the whole process—it all starts with stats. When your goals are based off performance data, you can easily spot strong points or inefficiencies within the team. Here’s your game plan.