Mike Smith

Head Coach

Holt High School, Holt Michigan

I'm not a big computer guy. My friends would probably say that I'm not even a little computer guy. I'm not going to say that I hate computers, but I will say that I have always avoided them, like the plague.

However, in the last year I have learned how to use a computer to watch game film and create scouting reports. And the best part is I don't do a lot of the data input. I have two assistant coaches, a dad and a student aide do most of the "grunt" work.

Friday night after the game our camera man brings the camera and game film to our coach's office. Coach Fulk attaches to the camera to our video editor (an iBook G4 by Apple) and digitizes the game film. That usually takes about thirty minutes and during that time I check on my players, call the paper etc. When the game film is done Coach Fulk launches Coach's Video Assistant and moves the game film to one of our small, portable drives. That usually takes another forty minutes, which is about the time we need to finish up any last minute phone calls, talks to players etc. So a little over an hour after the game is over I leave the locker room with a game film on my portable drive. Anytime during the next day or two I can plug that drive into my Dell PC at home and watch last night's game. I can make notes, right on the screen, for any player or coach. I can tag clips to be included in a cutup film for a player or group of players.

Sunday night we get together and everyone else shows up with their portable drives too. We have about six of them. Coach Fulk takes about ten minutes to combine all the data. (All he does is plug them into the iBook and choose the game film. Coach's Video Assistant does the rest!) In fifteen minutes I have all the down, distance, hash, formation and play information on my portable drive and everyone else has my notes, my tags and any other information I have added, on theirs as well. I simply launch Coach's Video Assistant, choose the game film and look at each play. All the fields that were blank before now have data! It is truly amazing, and not one of us spent eight hours doing all the work by ourselves.

We have also added a scout film or two and our game with this week's opponent from last year. I usually have about three game films of our opponent on my portable drive. We will each take a different game of our opponent's to break down, merging our information each morning before school.

I still don't know a lot about how the Macintosh works with the PC, but I do know it works well for us. We create our DVDs, our highlights and our cutups for our players on our Macintosh, but we do most of the data input on Dell PC's. But the thing I like the most about the system is just how easy it is to share the work. I didn't need to learn anything more than how to plug in and remove the portable drive from the Macintosh and the PC. Somehow, and I'm thinking it was magic, all the stuff that I typed, along with all the stuff four or five other people typed, ended up merged together.

I would recommend our system to anyone. We paid $1200 for the iBook G4 laptop, $995 for the software and $100 for each of the six portable drives. From what I have seen, that is a pretty inexpensive solution, especially when compared to other football systems that are available today.