Quality of exchanged film

We dont have a specific quality "rule". but most video exchanged is of really good quality. The major problem we have is that most schools in our conference are small rural type schools and the quality of the press boxes are vastly different. There is one school where you might as well be filming on the sideline.

The league here is making a decision that the home team will provide the end zone view to the visiting league team. We all have end zone systems, except for 1 of the 7 teams, so the is certainly feasible. It would help with the amount of gear we/they take to the away games. My problem is that I have very specific requirements for my EZ guy, something that I don't know about with the other teams. I don't mind the Hudl EZ exchange, but I just want to make sure that what everyone else does fits with what I expect, and vice versa.

Video quality is always an issue because sometime the guys flake and we have to put in a walking wounded player or a parent out of the stands, cars break down, cameras don't like cold weather, etc. so I can deal with that. If a team is doing bad video as their prime video, they either are a bad program and can't/won't pay attention to details, or they are sneaky bastids that are actively trying to get an advantage and we don't want anything to do with them.

Exactly, if they are purposely tanking you they are probably doing it to others who are more than willing to share any film they have (unless everyone hates you in which case you'll find out).

maybe I'm naive but I just don't see why someone would do this as a practice in the real world.

In Iowa, I think everyone has to have hudl. Someone can correct me on that if not. Our film exchanges are very good with the exception of one school I can almost always count on for a missing special teams play.

It's also a rule of our district to where all games get uploaded to a shared library or whatever it's called, on Hudl. This is good because of the "bad film" problem but it can also be good if the team you are preparing for has played teams immediately before you that have a totally different style. For example, one season our opponents almost always played a single wing school the week before they played us. So, it was good to have other looks more comparable to us on film.

I don't think we have a requirement, but it isn't a problem. We only had one team give us a garbage film, and we probably would have beat them just as badly if we had no film.

We are in a large urban area, 17 schools in our county alone. We have the usual politics and alliances, but there are 2 coaches in the area who regularly give bad film, and we suspect it is just their bad copy sent intentionally. Every coach knows about these 2, so we usually just get a copy from the opponent. We have room for a grievance somewhere in our county association guidelines, but it's not worth the effort. Let scumbags be scumbags as long as we can get help form others. If coaches pull moves like that, it is often a sign of larger problems involving lack of control and discipline within their program.

Forty three years of coaching perspective:

I started out scouting live on paper. Film was either 8 mm (or 16 mm if the school was wealthy). It cost about $250.00 for processing per game. We did not exchange film. Scouting this way is a lost art.

VHS was a significant improvement. We exchanged with some of our opponents, some we would not, due to edited tapes.
We had one guy in the league edit out every play where either his team scored or was scored upon.

We still had to have a State wide scouting network when the playoffs were a couple of weeks away because not everybody in the State would exchange. We were almost always able to get several games on tape, although we occasionally had to resort to sneaking cameras into games, which was no easy feat with the clunky VHS cameras.

Digital media pre Hudl- we had a weekly league wide film exchange. Every Saturday at noon we met at a central location and exchanges DVDs. We had to use a DVD copier for this, it made for a pretty hectic Saturday morning.

Now via Hudl everyone in the league exchanges film online. This is mandated.
Most of the teams have a regular video person ( I'm our varsity video guy), who knows what they are doing. Hey, everybody who films misses a play once in while.
One or two teams will have a parent or kid filming the game, you get all kind of crazy zooms, camera following the ball on punts, missing plays, etc., but for the most part we get decent quality film.

Hudl exchanges rewards teams who are not wiling or able to arrange for scouting and kinda levels the playing field, although all-in-all, I sure wouldn't want to go back to paper scouting. It also make it harder to hide weaker players or tendencies, as everybody has everything, no secrets.

I used to coach against a team that would use two cameras. 1. Film Exchange - Super low resolution bad angle (borderline sideline) 2. Their own film - high res etc. I always suspected it, but could never prove it until i saw them setting both up above the press box. One camera looked like one you see at a NFL game. The best way to confirm this if you suspect it is to compare the film exchange versus their Hudl player highlights.


Bad story. My first year I coached for a guy who would do anything to get an edge. We committed to play at a school 5 hours away game 1 and he didn't send the scout film until wednesday the week of the game. HE Kept claiming he put it in the mail and it got lost. Well we took the bus ride down there and they absolutely bodybagged us. Up 50 they still have their starters in and jammed power down our throats. I still suspect that they did it because of what our HC tried to pull with the film.

bignose That's how I learned to scout. Live with pen and paper. Old HC would always have me scout this way and then take my notes home to "use them on the tape". I learned later that he wouldn't look at them and just do his own work off the film. He wanted me to learn old school lol. Flash forward ten years and our camera dies halfway through the third. Good thing there's a "dummy" on staff who always takes pen and paper to scout.

Yep.  one coach consistently sends bad film...bad framing, shaky, out of focus, missing plays, etc.  The opponent usually sends out the film when asked.  We've followed up on it, he sends back some lame excuse.  Shocker, but his program sucks. A few adjustments on our part sends the game out of reach.

One year, we couldn't tell how bad the film was, because the tripod was in front of the camera most of the game.....