Hudl is listening and just provided a fix to your column data nightmare

High school coaches seem to gripe about Hudl on social media pretty much daily, with a lot of the chatter centered around New Hudl vs Hudl Classic. While a lot of those tweets disappear into the void, I've got a recent example of one that didn't. 

A few days back I shared a post that went viral, essentially sharing that there are a lot of things that Hudl does really, really well. Exceptionally well, in fact. Some of the things they've mastered have become so commonplace that if you never had to drive to a midway point on a weekend to swap a DVD or VHS with an opposing coach at a gas station or a rest stop just to get your next opponent's film, you can't fully appreciate what I mean.

Fact is, there seem like some very some simple workflow things within Hudl would make a coach's life so much easier that never seem to get taken into consideration by the sports tech giant.

This whole deal started with a sticking point I had come across with Hudl a few days ago. Heading into year seven as the head coach at Comstock Park HS, we inherited the previous staff's saved verbiage on Hudl, and then I've had four different defensive coordinators in those seven seasons, and I really didn't do a good job getting us all on the same page with what verbiage to use, and those things combined created an absolute mess of data in a few columns, and that's an issue that many coaches share. 

So after being asked about cleaning up some of those columns by my defensive coordinator, I started to poke around and that sparked my tweet that started with a tip of the cap to Hudl, but ended with some unnecessary friction for coaches. 

We had a ton of unnecessary fat that needed to be trimmed out in two columns in particular - OFF PLAY NAME, which had piled up to more than 2,000 different names, and OFF FORMATION, which was sitting north of 750 entries. Anyone who has spent a Sunday breaking down film knows how fast that clutter builds. Every typo, every one-off tag, every leftover from a coach who moved on becomes its own line in the list, and those pile up to create the nightmare we were facing.

Here was the problem. Hudl's interface gave you two options and only two. You could delete those values one at a time, which is at least two clicks each, or you could nuke all of them and start over from scratch. For a column with 2,000 entries, neither of those is a real solution. One takes an afternoon. The other throws out the good with the bad.

Reps from Hudl saw the tweet, we had a very brief conversation, and they got to work on a solution. That is worth sharing out loud, because it proves they are actually listening to the wants and needs of coaches across the country (for both New Hudl as well as Hudl Classic, not just talking about it.

Here's the solution they came up with, and have since shared.

Hudl shares that the changes have gone live and you will see the ability when you go to clean up your own columns now in the "Manage Breakdown" portion of the settings.

That will be small, insigificant change to some reading this, but for plenty of others it's going to turn an afternoon of clicking into a couple of minutes of light work. Select the junk in bulk, search to pull up everything that matches, clean it out, and get back to actually coaching.

For coaches heading into camp and thinking about how to organize their breakdown data before the season buries them, take a look at your overpopulated columns, and this is a good reminder that the folks building these tools do move when we speak up.

Stay tuned to The Scoop for the latest.