Matthew Zito Chats about How His Hudl Class Benefits Both Students and Coaches

As he perused the message boards on CoachHuey.com last year, Matthew Zito, an assistant coach at Plaquemine High School (La.), noticed several threads discussing the desire for a “Hudl class”. These coaches believed the class would not only help with the workload for their staffs, but also benefit students who wanted to pursue sports-related jobs some day.

But Zito didn’t just want to talk the idea. He decided to act upon it.

As the first year of the class comes to its conclusion, Hudl Radio caught up with Zito to learn about what he found. We started with Zito’s process of starting the class (1:30), what the students were responsible for during game weeks (3:50), what the coaching staff thought of the students’ work (11:30) and how the class is preparing the students for a future in sports analysis.

Here are a few nuggets from the episode, which can be found on SoundCloud or iTunes.

What were the students asked to do during a game week?

“On Monday, (the students) would come in and trim up the film and the big thing that was neglected, at least for us, is they would trim the opponent scout film too. We would ODK them, but some schools we play don’t trim their film, so it was a lot of dead time. (The students) did that for us. By week three, we would have the next three opponents, we’d have three of their games broken down already, just having all of the data in. That way the offensive and defensive coordinator just had to put in the formation, the play or the fronts, the coverage. It gave us more time to game plan.”

How did the students handle the responsibility? Was there a learning curve or did they pick it up pretty much right from the get-go?

“I’m only 27 and I think I understand technology pretty good. But when it comes to high school kids, they pick up technology way quicker than we do. I thought it would take me about two weeks to train them on everything we need to do. After week one, they started teaching me stuff that I didn’t know or I hadn’t figured out yet… They caught on really easy, and they’re really good at teaching themselves and teaching each other.”

When you talk to other coaches about this class, just how jealous are they?

“On Twitter the other day I put up some videos of what’s going on in the class. I had a coach from a school up the road, they tweeted back, ‘Hudl class? Is that a real thing?’ Some people don’t know about it, but the ones that do, down in New Orleans, they were like, ‘Man, I can’t believe you have Hudl class! That must save you plenty of time. If we had a Hudl class, we might not even have to meet on the weekends.’ They’re extremely jealous.”