The JumpForward app includes a searchable nationwide database for coaches and recruiters, complete with contact information.
#Hudl app images series
Nike’s Hudl app is the latest in a series of apps that have already infiltrated the college recruiting landscape, with previous examples offering a way for coaches to give recruits a virtual tour of their campuses or creating ways for them to track their communication with recruits. Their results are ranked against every other app user, and coaches and players can see immediately how they measure up. In the new mobile app, players can record video of themselves going through each of the drills. Those scores became tickets to The Opening.
Known as the Nike football rating, it gave the athletes a way to measure their performance against players at other camps and especially to the highest-ranked recruits. Nike created the standard in 2011 when it started giving camp attendees a score based on their performance in four drills: the vertical leap, the 40 yard dash, the 20 yard agility test and the power-ball toss. Starting in 2017, they’ll be able to earn an invite to The Opening directly through the app. Nike partnered with Hudl, a digital video platform used by a million high school athletes across the country, to create an app that lets every player prove himself in the camp drills without leaving their hometowns. That may finally be changing, thanks to the mobile phones most players already use every day. Players who can’t attend a camp, for financial or any other reason, don’t stand a chance of even getting an invitation.
Of the 17,000 or so who attend the company’s 19 regional football camps each year, only about 160 earn the coveted invite to the national showcase. Ninety-eight percent of current Division 1 football players attended a Nike camp during their recruiting cycles, along with many players who never earned a spot on a college roster. The holy grail is to be invited to the Nike event known as The Opening, an invitation-only camp held every July at the company’s world headquarters in Beaverton, Oregon. Families hopscotch across the country during the summer, hoping their kids do well enough at one camp to earn an invitation to the next one. Being recruited to play college football starts with many trips to local and regional training camps and showcases.