You Need a Watchable Highlight Tape. Here’s Exactly How.

Your highlight reel is competing with 1,000s of DMs, emails, and Hudl messages flooding coaches' inboxes right now. They don't want to watch it—not because they don't care about finding talent, but because they have seventeen minutes left in their day and your tape is the last thing on their mind.

Your opening play is everything. It needs to be the best single play of your season—something that makes evaluators say "WOW!" out loud. Think insane catch, brutal QB sack, pancake-run-blocking, game-winning 66-yard Hail Mary etc.

Your tape should be tight—no dead air, no pre/post-whistle nonsense

Skip the fancy intros. No highlight circles (unless you’re really hard to spot pre snap) or "wait for it's" around plays. No slow-motion replays of ordinary moments. Coaches want to see your tape in real speed (definitely don't mess with your tape being sped up or slowed unless it's really special/storage-worthy).

Every second you're not showing a compelling play is a second you're losing coaches’ limited attention.

Show your complete skill set organized by what you do. This isn't just about you—it's about making their job easier:

Offensive Line:

Quarterback:

Kicker/Punter:

This tape is only a preview of your best stuff to get them willing to evaluate the rest of you athletically and academically. Coaches are going to find your games—this is about making them want to.

Screen-record it and post that video to X. Don't make coaches have to go to Hudl for everything. While you can use ad blockers, it can still cost valuable seconds to flip between X and Hudl apps.

There is an inverse relationship between a highlight tape's production value and how good a player actually is. While it helps, 1080 FPS 4K film isn't necessary to see if a player's a freak stud or not. The more vanilla the tape production-value-wise, the better the player, usually.

Vanilla beats Vegas every time. Ultimately things like size, speed, height, weight, burst, aggression, fitting tackles, making great plays in real games with real stakes matter a lot more than HD quality video.

Make sure your X account is linked to your Hudl account. The search functions on both platforms aren't great. Don't make it harder than it already is to track you down by not linking from Hudl profile to X profile. There have been many times when I’ve heard of a player that I try to look up on X and can’t find, but then I can find them on Hudl only to see they have no X account linked with their Hudl. Hudl is great, but coaches cannot directly reach out to there as easily as they can on X.

If you lack tape because of injury, you don't need to put only this season’s tape. Highlight tapes can be cumulative—splice your best stuff from your high school career to date. If/when a coach gets more serious about evaluating you, they’ll find game-specific tape.

If you really have no tape, then take whatever you have for the season and you can put some training tape at the end of your Hudl tape. It’s not perfect, but putting some training tape from when you were not injured at the end of your season high light tape can help “pad” out your film until you are back healthy.

Hudl is cumbersome to edit, but if you need to pull other clips, you can screen-record your best stuff on iPhone (horizontally), then use CapCut or iMovie to bring together different camera angles.

You can also show the same play from different angles, especially if it's really good. Discover sideline and tight (behind) angles. Sometimes there's a good broadcast copy of clips you can pull as well.

This isn't about highlight tapes. It's about understanding that recruiting is a filtering system that, unfortunately, has its default set to ignore most players. But, when a coach eventually does get around to turning on a kid’s tape, you want it to be as watchable as possible.

That’s all for now,

Coach Cahill

PS When you’re ready, schedule a discovery call here for free to get your recruiting going in the right direction.