With Hudl’s system, Cook can break down the details of a match video to pull out useful information about the team performance. These are the factors drove Cook to look for visual stimuli to communicate efficiently with his players, and Hudl proved to be the perfect answer. This helps address the situation where athletes and coaches remember things differently from how they actually transpired during the play due to stress, biases, and pressure psychological factors. In fact, athletic psychologists have also proven that the video restores human brain's ability to recall specific situations in sports. He has realized that the generation Y athletes spend most of their time staring at a screen, making them visual learners. I don’t think I could find a better fit.David Graff, CEO As the head coach of the Nebraska Cornhuskers- volleyball team representing the University of Nebraska, John Cook has kept the team at the top of the college volleyball rankings for much of the last 18 years through the ability to alter his teaching style to connect with players. Graff concludes, “My two biggest areas of passion are sports and technology. Graff says “Accel stood out in having a track record of companies they’ve helped succeed through this scaling stage.” I’ll spare you the cliché “on steroids” metaphor, but the funding could rapidly accelerate Hudl’s growth.ĭown the line, Graff says he’d be willing to take Hudl public if it makes sense, or run it as a private business, though he insists it’s “not looking to be acquired.” Hudl never started as a money-maker anyways. But Hudl is bringing in a ringer with Accel and its funding.
With mobile democratizing video recording, all these companies have been in a fierce sales war. There are plenty of startups crowding the paint, though, like XOS for the NFL, Sportstec for the NBA, and Krossover for high school teams. Now with the new $72.5 million from Accel, Nelnet, and former Microsoft Business president Jeff Raikes, it plans to have enough money in the bank to “be opportunistic about making acquisitions” of competitors, Graff tells me. Now it’s grown to 230 employees across four offices, and has made several acquisitions to break into new markets, like UberSense to support individual athletes like runners and weight lifters, and ReplayAnalysis to pick up English football premiership clubs. After starting with just a few teams, it quickly became profitable, leading it to forgo additional funding or much press. Started by Graff and his University Of Nebraska-Lincoln buddies John Wirtz and Brian Kaiser, Hudl raised an early $3 million seed round from angel investors back around 2008. It’s now running video pre-roll ads on its most popular clips, and licensing them out to news outlets like ESPN and Bleacher Report. It’s these kinds of videos that represent Hudl’s next big revenue stream. Suddenly Leiato had offers from UCLA and Michigan State before going to play for powerhouse D1 team University Of Oregon. It showed him utterly destroying opponents while blocking for kick returns. There have been a slew of success stories of otherwise little-known players who got big offers to play at top schools thanks to Hudl.įotu Leiato, for example, went to Washington’s Steilacoom High School and was looking at D3 football programs when his Hudl highlight video went viral. Hudl CEO David Graff tells me most serious high school athletes now list their Hudl link on their Twitter profile. Hudl does it all, from football, baseball, and basketball, to tennis, golf, and volleyball, to water skiing, snowboarding, and bobsledding.
Hudl players can then cobble together highlight videos of their play that they can openly host on their Hudl profile for fans to watch, post to social networks, or instantly send to recruiters. Coaches can add text, drawing and audio annotations to Hudl videos to teach players what they did right and wrong.
That used to be quite difficult, especially when teams were traveling. So what exactly does Hudl do? Coaches can use it to either record or upload video tape of games and practices that can be viewed by all their players on mobile.
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