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How Hudl Assist Taps into the ​‘Physical, Visual and Emotional Belief’ of Player Development

by

From the Hudl Blog

By Brendan Hall

This girls soc­cer pow­er has long stood out for its devo­tion to film analy­sis. Adopting Hudl’s auto­mat­ed report­ing has only super­charged their abil­i­ty to play with­out thinking.

Before DVDs, before 8mm cas­sette tapes, and well before your aver­age soc­cer team invest­ed thou­sands into dis­sect­ing every inch of the pitch, Todd Kelly was already a film buff. 

But when the Loveland (Ohio) girls soc­cer head coach says ​“you don’t know how excit­ed I was” to adopt Hudl, he means it. 

Version 1.0 of Kelly’s film break­down process a quar­ter-cen­tu­ry ago was a bear, near­ly wear­ing out the fast-for­ward and rewind but­tons on his VCR. Minutes stretched into what felt like eons as he searched for the right moments to pin down. 

This was a process that typ­i­cal­ly took sev­en to 10 hours of his week. But to take it to the same depth that he does with Hudl? He says that would have tak­en him ​“about 20 to 24 hours”. With Assist reports, he’s doing it in as lit­tle as five.

“We couldn’t do what we do now with­out Hudl,” Kelly says. ​“There’s no way.”

In the days before a match, play­ers get a game-plan­ning pack­et that can exceed two dozen pages, using screen­grabs tak­en from Hudl film. With every data point on Assist reports tied to video, cre­at­ing one is sur­pris­ing­ly easy. 

Need to see how a scor­ing chance came about? Kelly clicks to the mark on the shot chart and takes the freeze-frame he needs. Wondering why they’re so strong in the mid­field? Kelly can open up the pos­ses­sion and pass string charts, see how their attacks built up, and stop where he needs to. No more search­ing blind­ly through an entire half of footage.

This work­flow allows the Loveland coach­es to com­mu­ni­cate robust infor­ma­tion in sim­ple terms. A typ­i­cal pack­et is whit­tled down to five talk­ing points: 

  • Three things they need to do well to win.
  • Two things they need to elim­i­nate from the opposition. 

And then on game-day morn­ings, head coach Todd Kelly tells them to take that pack­et and ​“throw it in the trash”. They’re done thinking.

No prob­lem, coach. Everything’s already com­mit­ted to mus­cle memory.

Streamlined Corner Kick Reviews

Loveland has a well-earned rep­u­ta­tion for mas­ter­ing cor­ner kicks. And with it, con­fi­dence that they’re nev­er out of a game. So nat­u­ral­ly, this is the first thing Kelly looks at when he gets Hudl Assist reports on his game and scout films. Clicking the cor­ner kicks col­umn on the game report pop­u­lates them all in one neat playlist.

As such, Loveland ded­i­cates expan­sive time prepar­ing set pieces. It’s not uncom­mon to spend a half-hour of every prac­tice on this area, and hours dis­sect­ing them on Hudl.

On game nights, the Tigers may have as many as 16 set plays on their menu, depend­ing on how the defense lines up. That also means play­ers have to be pre­pared enough to know, in an instant, which of those plays to run.

“For us to be able to do that gran­u­lar and that lev­el of detail comes from watch­ing us on film and what our oppo­nents are doing,” Kelley says. ​“So that we can pre­pare our kids, ​‘When you see this, because we’ve seen it on film of our oppo­nents, this is what you need to do, this is what [set piece] you need to run.’”

Pass String Data Makes a Difference

If you were to run Assist reports on Loveland’s 2017 state cham­pi­on squad, you would have found the Tigers were very direct, with few pass strings. This meant at times bypass­ing their skilled mid­field, to take advan­tage of some excep­tion­al tal­ents both at the back and up top.

This past sea­son, Loveland’s per­son­nel sug­gest­ed they’d be able to effi­cient­ly string pass­es togeth­er through the mid­field. But there were some issues. By look­ing through the pass string data on his team, assis­tant coach Dan Donovan made two key discoveries:

  1. When the ball was played to a Loveland play­er with an oppo­nent clos­ing down, they were turn­ing the ball over too quick­ly.
    ​“It wasn’t that they don’t have a good touch, it was that the touch was in the wrong place.”
  2. Some of their off-ball move­ment was sub-par. Their runs didn’t stretch the defense enough, nor were they timed cor­rect­ly.
    ​“It was still being, you know, stand­ing behind two defend­ers too late, and it caus­es us to have two or three touch­es on the ball-car­ri­er before the per­son was in the window.”

As a result, the Tigers made sig­nif­i­cant changes to their prac­tice reg­i­men to work on those fix­es. The pay­off was anoth­er region­al final berth. And with it, proof that con­firm­ing your hunch­es with visu­al data strength­ens your coach­ing lessons.

That goes for scout­ing, too. Loveland finds that the data on pass strings tends to reveal a lot right away about an opponent’s style of play. 

For instance, if your oppo­nent has few­er pass strings, that means they’re habit­u­al­ly play­ing direct. They’re look­ing to win the ball and imme­di­ate­ly play it for­ward, find­ing their tar­get down­field as quick­ly as pos­si­ble. More pass­es stringed togeth­er sug­gests a more pos­ses­sion-ori­ent­ed, build-up approach. They might knock it around the back line, try­ing to cre­ate pass­ing lanes by draw­ing oppo­nents out of position.

“You have the oppor­tu­ni­ty to cre­ate all three of those things that are impor­tant in play­er devel­op­ment — phys­i­cal, visu­al, and the emo­tion­al belief.” Donovan says of Assist. ​“That’s how they’re going to work hard at it, repeat it, and not let it become a bad habit again.”

Crawl Before You Walk

The advan­tage of Assist is easy to under­stand. Donovan’s advice to coach­es new to Hudl is to focus first on the essen­tials. That means a two-step process:

  1. Understand your team’s strengths and weaknesses.
  2. Plan prac­tices around that knowledge.

Seems sim­ple, right? But it’s easy to get car­ried away at first.

“Just do those two things, before you get to any­thing else,” he says. ​“You just have to try. But I do believe that if you go and think about every­thing you can do, it becomes too over­whelm­ing to start.”

***

Hudl Assist doesn’t just empow­er your coach­ing staff to take your analy­sis sub­stan­tial­ly deep­er — it lets you do it in far less time. These reports are easy to digest. And with every stat tied direct­ly to video, you’ll give your­self count­less hours back while dou­bling down on details you nev­er knew before.

Learn More | Take a Demo

 


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