By Delaney Jackson

Reporter

Many sports at Blue Springs South use the app Hudl, but not many know that a South alumni invented the app.

Hudl is a sports app that allows teams to record and upload their videos to a private place where they can share it with each other, cut out the most important clips, and add drawings and comments to help make the video a more powerful teaching tool. Athletes can also make highlight reels off the video to share with their family, friends, and recruiters. The newest app- Hudl Technique- lets anyone, whether you are on the team or not, record video, watch it in slow motion, draw on it, and learn from it.

South alumni John Wirtz got the idea for the app nine years ago from a friend.

“David Graff, one of my co-founders at Hudl, worked in Sports Information in the Nebraska Athletic Department and got to see first hand how inefficient a lot of things were for the football team in terms of getting opponent scouting video, their game video, and their practice video out to the team. They were burning hundreds of DVDs a week and handing them out, and most players weren’t really watching them. It was 2006 and early days for online video but as soon as we saw what they were trying to do with the DVD, we felt confident we could build software that let them share video through the web a lot more easily and track which athletes watched it, add voice overs and drawings to the video to make it more valuable, and tie the video into their playbook and deliver those through the same system. Over 50 different sports, 125,000 teams, and over 4 million users use the app to do all sorts of things with sports video,” Wirtz said.

Wirtz went to the University of Nebraska, where he was offered an academic scholarship. That is where he met the two guys who helped him create the app. When they first started designing the app, Wirtz said that they were pretty naive. They just started building a prototype of the system, and reviewing it with the coaching staff at Nebraska. After a year of development, they launched a beta version to the Nebraska Cornhuskers Football Team in July of 2007. As they watched players and coaches use the beta version, they learned a ton about what they got right and all the bad decisions they’d made, and started tweaking things.

“It took us a year to get something in the hands of Nebraska Football, about two more years to adapt the app to work for high school and small colleges, and we’ve been constantly tweaking and enhancing our apps for all nine years of the apps existence. It’s a non-stop battle to keep innovating and serving our athletes and coaches better,” Wirtz said.

The app has grown with the number of teams, athletes, and coaches using the app. Wirtz now gets to spend a lot of time traveling to other countries to expand the app further.

“I’ve definitely spent a lot more time with coaches and athletes after graduating college than I ever imagined. I’ve gotten to meet some of the best coaches in the world and see some of the most amazing sports venues in the world. Now that we have grown globally, I get to travel to some great places. We now have offices in 16 countries and I work with engineers in Lincoln, Omaha, Boston, London, and Sydney on a regular basis,” Wirtz said.

The app is not only used for sports. Physics teacher Nathan Dorsch uses the app in his AP physics class as well. He said that he learned that the app can be used for physics at an AP physics conference.

“It allows us to get more accurate reaction times in labs, and catch errors that we wouldn’t be able to catch with just a stopwatch,” Dorsch said.

He says that he showed another physics teacher at Blue Springs High School, and they now use the app in their labs too.

In addition to inventing Hudl, Wirtz also held all four of the South diving records, until three of them were broken this year. His diving career has inspired him to invent an app that is specific to diving only.

“We have some exciting new technology we are working on for diving specifically. We are experimenting with a technology called Computer Vision that we think could let coaches analyze diving video in completely new ways and make video a part of practice in completely new ways. It is still in the early stages, but I am hoping to get down to some practices at South and have the team try it out soon and give me some feedback,” Wirtz said.