Go-To Game Film Resources For Your Team’s Performance

Create Highlight Reels

One of the newer game film resources that players and coaches are taking advantage of highlight reels. At one point, to be recruited and offered a scholarship from a university, players would have to have scouts come to one of their games to watch them play. This put enormous amounts of pressure on that one game, requiring the player to basically have the best game of their career, in hopes of securing a scholarship offer. Now, game film offers a different tack. Players can work with their coaches to create highlight reels of their best plays over a full season. This allows them to showcase all of their skills, not just the ones they end up using in one game. It also allows them to skip over any mistakes they may make to present the most favorable picture to the schools they want to attend. These highlight reels can be shared with prospective schools directly, posted on social media, shown to friends and family, or anything the player wants. When creating highlight reels, advise your players to keep them around three to six minutes. This gives them plenty of time to showcase your skills and a variety of plays, while still being respectful of the recruiter’s time. Make sure they know to use clips that show their versatility, understanding of the sport, and athleticism, but keep it to 20 clips or less. Then you can pull these clips from your game film resources or reach out to other players to see what they have.

Review Games

Every good coach knows that each game will build on the ones before it. Game film resources can help you get a clear picture of what happened, what worked, and what didn’t, and communicate this clearly to your team. A good quality team will spend a lot of time in practice getting in the mindset of what the game will actually be like, but the adrenaline rush of competing always changes things up a bit, and understanding what a player is thinking while making a play is pivotal to improving performance. Rewatching game film allows your players to see everything that was happening during a play, not just what they were involved in.

Rewatching pivotal moments of the game allows you to analyze what happened, without the emotions and adrenaline rush of competition and playing. If you have a play or two that goes really well in practice, but went totally wrong in a game, this is the perfect thing to pull out game film for. As part of a practice, have the players involved sit down and watch what happened. Then you can talk about what should have happened, what actually happened, and why. Getting a clear picture of where things differ in a game from practice not only helps players understand how to fix these issues, it can bring your team closer together. Players can’t read each other’s minds, and it can be frustrating if someone else messes up something you think they know. Getting to hear everyone’s point of view can alleviate some of these frustrations and help your team work better together in the future. Understanding what happens can also help improve your coaching methods by helping you see what you need to work on with the team or individual players.

Using game film to review a game can also allow you to get a full statistical picture of what happened. Game film video and analytic hosting services will analyze your film for you and record analytics for you to review. These analytics tend to be more comprehensive than what you get from the scoreboard or scorekeepers. This in-depth analysis allows you to see where players are excelling and lets you place them where they are needed the most.

Learn New Plays

Players that spend more time watching game film and really studying their sport are the players that tend to excel. These are the players that have a natural instinct on how to react, because they have so much to pull from their memory. Learning new plays can be challenging for some players, and using game film resources to teach is a great way to help them overcome this. When learning a new skill, it is just as important to visualize yourself successfully performing as it is to do it, and watching game film of the plays that they are learning is a great way for players to visualize themselves successfully executing the new plays. It also gives a new dimension to your instruction on how the new plays are performed. You can describe it, show it on a white board, walk through it slowly with your players, and then show them how it is actually performed. This gives them a fuller picture and it lets them see how it stacks up against opponents.

While not as common, you can also use game film to teach your team by recording a play during practice. Have your team perform whatever skill they are working on full out, while recording them. Then have them watch what they just did. This will help them clearly identify what they are doing right and what needs more help. If possible, it is better to not to tell them when you are filming so you can get a good view of what they would look like naturally.

Game film resources are an excellent way to improve your team’s performance and to highlight what needs improving. Make sure that you don’t fall behind other teams and that you use it to its full potential.

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