The Situation
The pandemic wreaked havoc on college sports coaches and their staffs as athletic departments nationally implemented travel restrictions. With COVID-19 restrictions preventing coaches from visiting potential recruits in person, programs needed to get creative. Technology became an important asset for coaches to keep programs moving forward.
In doing so, Stanton client Hudl, a leading sports tech company, was at the epicenter to provide coaches and their staffs with all of the information they would need during a normal recruitment cycle: highlights, athlete measurements, game film, practice recordings and much more.
Given the impact of COVID-19 on recruiting, Stanton connected with Mike McAllister from Sports Illustrated to offer interviews with a Hudl executive as well as major college and high school coaches using the platform to recruit and proceed with day-to-day operations. The idea interested Mike.
From there, Stanton coordinated and staffed conversations with Hudl Vice President & General Manager Greg Nelson, Jacksonville State Assistant Football Coach J.R. Sandlin and Lake Travis High School (Austin, TX) Assistant Football Coach Jonathan Coats. Using his own network of sources, McAllister also interviewed Syracuse Football Director of Recruiting Kramer Cook. He also interviewed a 2020 recruit on the team.
The Results
Stanton’s efforts placed Hudl at the center of McAllister’s feature story, titled “Recruiting in a Pandemic,” which appeared on Sports Illustrated’s All American and Syracuse verticals.
Nelson, a high school football coach himself, highlighted how people are analyzing film and athlete profiles in unique ways. “What are they doing when they get knocked down, how resilient are they? They’re able to tell a lot of things about that whole game film, and then the beauty of Hudl is that athletes also have the ability to upload their transcripts or vitals like 40 time, vertical time, their awards and those kind of things so they can kind of get a full picture of the athlete they’re evaluating.”
Read the full story here to see how Stanton placed Hudl at the center of the movement in one of the top sports publications globally. Learn how we help our technology clients here.