ORIG 09/19/2014 Ryan Brennecke / The BulletinFootball statistic app being used during the Summit Ashland football game on Friday.

Midway through his own thought, Matt Craven just begins laughing.

There were no smartphones or touch-screen tablets when he played football at Bend High in the early 1990s. There were VHS tapes that produced fuzzy video, which Craven and his teammates and coaches studied to scout opponents. Before that, Craven remembers seeing his father, longtime Lava Bears assistant Mick Craven, watching 16-millimeter film.

Matt Craven is really not as old as this flashback might suggest, the now-Bend coach emphasizes as his chuckles return. But, he recalls, back when he played football at Bend High, “our phone still hooked into the wall. We didn’t even dream of technology like this.”

That technology he refers to includes PlayMaker Pro, a playbook application used by Bend High (and surely many more). It includes Digital Scout, a stat-keeping app utilized by Summit. But perhaps most notable, that technology includes Hudl, an app that, according to the company’s website, is “revolutionizing the way coaches and athletes prepare for and stay ahead of the competition.”

With Hudl, the long sessions of studying film projected on a wall in a stale football team room are a thing of the past. Because through Hudl, video now is accessible at any time, at any place, via cellphone or tablet. And that technology is now being used by most if not all Class 5A football teams in Oregon.

“It’s a huge, HUGE tool for us and our kids,” says Mountain View coach Brian Crum. “You walk down the hallway at 7:15 in the morning, they (Cougar players) will be sitting against the wall with their phone out. They’re not texting. They’re watching Hudl. They’re watching their opponent. They’re watching practice. It really has changed the game of football, for both coaches and players.”

Craven remembers a similar form of technology not that long ago called Digital Sports Video. He recalls DSV having nearly all the perks of Hudl — except, with DSV, Craven says, “you had to be a computer programmer to work it, and you couldn’t exchange film via Internet.” With Hudl, that travel has been eliminated.

“It makes it so much easier to trade films with teams instead of meeting at the top of Santiam Pass on Saturday afternoon,” Crum says, “then trying to break stuff down back in the old days of VHS or 16-millimeter film.”

While Craven prefers to watch an opponent’s game film in its entirety to understand the “feel of the game,” with Hudl, coaches and players have the ability to categorize plays — by down and distance, by field positioning, by run or pass, by just about anything.

“It’s pretty amazing how far they’ve come in the last five years with it,” observes Craven, whose program is in its fourth season of using Hudl.

“In terms of scouting and what you can do, it just blows you away,” Crum says. “The level of reports that you can get … you can really get to the minute level. In the old days, you had to use intuitive ability or you were marking with pen and pencil. But now, those reports come out, and you can start to see some real trends and start to game-plan around those and let your kids know what to look for.”

Another feature of Hudl might appeal to players the most. Not long ago, building a highlight reel for college recruiters involved players and coaches holing up for hours, scouring through game tape and splicing plays together. Now, players can collect plays — clips, really — on Hudl and insert graphics to their liking before sending highlight video packages off to college coaches.

Because of all of these features provided by Hudl, players want to watch video. That includes senior Bend running back Hunter McDonald, who says that he watches game tapes “pretty much all the time, every day.” It also includes the Lava Bears’ starting quarterback, Creighton Simmonds, a senior who watches video during his open periods or while at home or “anywhere, really,” he says.

“It just boosts confidence,” says Simmonds, whose team has won its past two games. “Everyone knows what they’re doing because they can see themselves physically doing it. … I think last year we had 15 minutes of watching it all together, like every player. And this year, we have hours and hours and hours of everyone watching it because (the app) adds up the times you watch. The hours and hours compared to 15 minutes last year is a big difference.”

Hudl is revolutionary, as shown by Playbook Scripts, an animated playbook feature used by Mountain View that allows Cougars coaches to attach clips of the team executing each play correctly or incorrectly. The app is a timesaver of sorts, allowing players to watch video whenever they want and giving coaches more scheduling flexibility as they do not have to physically be present to break down footage. But, Craven points out, this technological innovation in instruction will never usurp the real thing.

“It will never replace direct instruction and having a physical teacher there to guide it,” Craven says. “It’s a great tool. But it’s not the teacher. High school kids have to be taught HOW to watch film. A lot of them come in as freshmen and just watch themselves. … They need instruction on how to be effective in watching film.”

The Cougars are in their fifth season using Hudl and their third of “heavily being into it,” according to the third-year coach Crum. Over the past four years, Mountain View has compiled a 38-10 overall record with three Intermountain Conference titles, three trips to at least the state quarterfinals and a Class 5A championship. And Hudl, Crum says, gets “a ton of credit.”

“It’s only going to create a better group of football players, not just around here but around the country,” Crum says. “Kids have so much more access to watch themselves and get better at what they do. It’s really changed football.”

—Reporter: 541-383-0307, glucas@bendbulletin.com.