Against The Grain

by: Richard Scott
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It only happened once. And it never happened again. Maybe that’s because Southern Miss video director Chris Hooley is too busy doing her job to let her status as the first woman in her position in Division I-A college football become an issue.

There was a time when an NFL scout came to visit her video office for film on some potential NFL prospects. He made a rather unnecessary comment about her not belonging in a man’s game and then slipped in a couple of other snide remarks.

When Hooley’s boss heard about the incident he not only called the scout on the carpet but later that Hooley day received an apology from the scout’s boss.

“A lot of the scouts I talk to enjoy coming here to watch tape,” Hooley says. “A lot of other schools are getting into, too, but we shoot both end zones for games and scouts love to watch our tape because they can do a better job of scouting our players.”

That’s because it’s all about job performance. And this is one job, being a video coordinator for Division I athletic department, where being a man has no obvious or necessary advantages. Bowling Green administrators obviously believe this as well, because they recently hired former Marshall assistant Jennifer Holmes as the department’s video coordinator.

“I don’t see any reason why a woman can’t do this job,” Hooley says. “I’ve been in sports video since 1996, working mainly with football.”

The key, Hooley learned early on, is not mastering the football end of the job but instead learning the technology that comes with running a digital video system and then working and communicating effectively with coaches.

Hooley didn’t play organized football as a kid, but she did grow up as a football fan and attended high school in Sistersville, W.Va., home of one of West Virginia’s perennial prep football powers.

Hooley says she “lucked into sports video” after graduating from the University of Kentucky in 1996 with a degree in telecommunications. A friend, current Kentucky video coordinator Kip Perkins, told her about an opening on the staff. She applied, got the job “and I just fell in love with it.”

From there, luck gave way to performance and experience as Hooley moved on to the University of Houston as an assistant video coordinator from 1998-2000, and then became the video director at Southern Miss in 2000. She now runs a staff of four students, but she’s hoping to add a graduate assistant next year. In addition to football, her staff is also responsible for working with the department’s other sports teams.

Throughout her climb up the industry ladder, Hooley has found that her lack of football experience hasn’t been a hindrance. After all, several successful college coaches, including Texas A&M’s Dennis Franchione, never played college football.

“On my end, the coaches break down all the games and all I’ve got to do is merge the data and make sure all the data is correct when it gets merged,” Hooley says. “You can check that by knowing down, distance and hash. It helps to know the formations, but for what I do it’s not a necessity. Granted I know more about football than some guys do, but I definitely don’t know as much as the coaches do and I still manage to get the job done.”

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