Question: What is meant by the term "football scouting"?

Answer: Scouting is a term that is used by football coaches to refer to part of the process of preparing to play an opponent. A "scout" collects information about an upcoming opponent and prepares a report and/or a video recording of the game.  The widespread availability of live-streamed and online digital video exchange has largely replaced in-person video recording and scouting of football games.

 

Question: What does football scouting software do ?

Answer: Football scouting software structures and organizes the collection and analysis of information about the plays in a football game. Each play is "broken down" in a way that makes it possible to perform analysis and print reports to determine tendencies.

 

Question: Why do I need this type of software if I can watch video cutups?

Answer:  Game video is more useful to a football coach when the plays in one or more games are categorized. This results in more efficient and effective film study and makes determining Offensive and Defensive tendencies easier and quicker.   Game plans, practice plans and game-week preparation can all benefit when detailed film study is combined with data and tendency analysis.

 

Question: Can I use scouting software to "scout" ourselves as well as our opponents?

Answer: Absolutely. In fact, a number of coaches who use Hudl to scout their opponents, use our Easy-Scout software to perform their "self-scout".   This type of analysis reveals their own play calling tendencies and tells a coach what worked and what didn't work and why.  

 

Question: What is the difference between Easy-Scout Plus and Easy-Scout Professional?

Answer: Easy-Scout Plus is software that determines tendencies from "data" that is typed into the computer for each play. The data is often transferred to the computer from a scouting form or play calling script. Easy-Scout Professional adds video playback, video editing, video analysis and the ability to create cutups and highlight clips. With Easy-Scout Pro, a football coach can watch game video in one part of the screen, record the "breakdown" data in another, and link the video and scouting data for each play. This makes it possible to quickly retrieve plays and groups of plays for viewing and to produce cutups.

 

Question:  Where is the video stored in Easy-Scout Professional?

Answer:  Easy-Scout Professional video is stored in a "folder" that is directly accessible from the Windows computer.  This can be on the computer's hard drive itself, on an external or flash drive, or in Dropbox, OneDrive or similar applications. 

 

Question: What format does the video need to be in ?

Answer: The best formats are Windows Media (WMV) or DV-AVI because producing cutups (that are smaller in file size) is possible.  Since video in these formats may require converting the video, some coaches choose to use MPEG 4 video, which, while limited to indexed playback and fast retrieval of individual plays or groups of plays, can not be used to create cutups. Regardless of the video file format, Easy-Scout Professional works with a single video file per game, rather than individual clips for each play.