(From left) Kyle Murphy, Brett Kunz, Matt Mueller, David Graff and Bryant Bone were part of Hudl’s contingent at Big Omaha in May. Today, Hudl welcomes new hires that bring its team to more than 40 people. Photo by Michael Stacy.
Usually it’s Hudl that helps coaches win, and not the other way around. But these days, Hudl might be wise to seek the advice of the coaches it’s accustomed to assisting, because the Lincoln-based company, which produces web-based coaching software, may require auxiliary insight on subjects like overseeing a big recruiting class and adapting to a fancy new facility.
Such are the challenges Hudl is handling in its Haymarket headquarters at the moment, thanks to a load of new hires and the expansion of its office.
Thanks to our sponsor
“It’s a busy time, but we’re having a lot of fun I think,” Hudl co-founder and CEO David Graff said by phone late last month. “Everybody here is really enjoying it.”
Graff (left, photo from hudl.com) said that today Hudl will welcome a batch of new employees that will bring the company’s total workforce to more than 40, double the size it was at this time last year.
Those new hires come on board not long after Hudl opened a new wing of its office, bumping its total space from 4,000 square feet to about 7,000. And nary a nook of the new square footage is without some sort of homage to the sports around which Hudl’s business is based, from walls decorated like a football field and basketball court to space carved out for a Pop-A-Shot machine (pictured below, photo from Hudl on Facebook).
“We see a lot of really cool facilities between (NCAA) Division I and NFL teams,” Graff said, “and so we kind of tried to take a little more of the sports aspect that we saw at those places and integrate it a little more in that area.”
Hudl’s aggressive expansion is needed to keep pace with the company’s ballooning client base. Hudl started at the high school level in 2008 and had 12 pilot partners. That number grew to about 350 in 2009. Then things really exploded. Last year, Hudl had 2,200 high school teams. Graff said the number “should be 4-5,000” this season in the high school ranks, plus about 25 Division I teams (twice the number Hudl had one year ago) and the NFL’s New York Jets.
Graff said that growth can be attributed in part to the fact that Hudl was brought to market as a web-based subscription service, unlike some of the competition.
“We kind of started with online video from the very start with subscription model, so a lot of other companies are kind of morphing their plans into that,” Graff said. “And so we’re just a little better built to support that model, at least for now.”
Despite its head start with the web-based subscription model, Hudl is hardly playing the hare’s role in the race against later-adapting competitors. Hudl recently completed an overhaul of its site infrastructure to enable things like faster sorting and filtering of clips and consolidated navigation menus that allow users more space for videos and data. In a post on the Hudl blog last month, user experience engineer Kyle Murphy compared revamping the site to completely rebuilding the foundation of a house.
“For the past six weeks, our product team has been building and testing a faster, stronger, and more stable foundation for Hudl,” Murphy (below, photo from hudl.com) said. “Now it’s finally ready.”
Said Graff of the project: “We’ve never really gone this deep on re-architecting the site, period, since it first got started.”
Hudl last month introduced Mercury, a system Murphy outlined in another recent blog post that enables users to more quickly upload video to the Hudl website. And Hudl’s iPad app, which was released in February, continues to be a game-changer.
“That’s probably what has driven a lot of our growth in Division I schools this year,” Graff said, “is just that more and more coaches and more and more players just love to consume video on the iPad.”
Meanwhile, Hudl tackled a full schedule of meetups for the first time this summer, and members of the Hudl team have been traveling around the country to facilitate get-togethers of coaches (Hudl-users or not) from all levels. So, just as the coaches Hudl helps are guiding their teams through 7-on-7 leagues and offseason conditioning, Hudl is working hard during the summer months so its team is ready come autumn.
“It’s a good time for us to get our new team members,” Graff said, “and we’ve got an awesome crew of people that we’ve added this year that I’m really excited to see them work with our coaches … this fall.”
For more on Hudl Mercury, see the video below.
Video from HudlSupport on YouTube.
