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AFM Magazine


Focus the man behind the camera

Take a close look at what video coordinator Brad Helton is doing for Marshall\'s football team both on and off the field
by: Richard Scott
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Nearly nine years after the fact, Brad Helton can finally admit it. When he became Marshall’s video coordinator in 1995, Helton re-wired his entire office area.

“That way the coaches couldn’t even come in here and make a tape,” Helton says, laughing. “At the time, I didn’t know how many programs even had video coordinators or how many people were doing it or what they were doing it with, so I did it for job security. I figured if they couldn’t even come in and make a tape, there’s a need.”

Since then, meeting needs has become a daily habit for Helton. In fact, it’s safe to say Helton has earned a high degree of job security at Marshall by meeting countless needs as the athletic department’s video coordinator.

“The technology has taken us places we never imagined 8-10 years ago.” - Mark Gale

From the days when the video department meant a couple of home video cameras and VCRs to the today’s current digital computer set-up, Helton has played a vital role in Marshall’s football success by meeting the news of the Thundering Herd coaches and players.

“He’s invaluable to what we do,” says assistant head coach Mark Gale. “He even runs the jumbo screen outside the stadium, he helps us in recruiting, he puts highlight videos together for the recruits and for the team or our opponents. He even does a fabulous job in the offseason with our players who are getting ready for the draft, putting together highlight films of their careers that they can send to NFL clubs. It’s not just an August-to-December job. It’s a year-round thing. He’s a very important and integral part of our success and what we do every week.”

Not bad for a guy who never pictured himself doing this job when he graduated from East Tennessee State in 1994 as a mass communications major. Then again, back in the mid-90s, not many programs pictured hiring a full-time video coordinator running a complex digital video system.

Coaches like to say there’s nothing new in the game when it comes to Xs and Os, that the same old football ideas just continue to be recycled and re-invented, but that’s not true when it comes to technology.

This is no longer a job where a head coach can afford to hire a part-time student, a charity case like a former coach just trying to hang on in the game or some booster’s knucklehead son or nephew, or someone who doesn’t know a computer mouse from a CD-Rom drive for that matter.

Instead, today’s video coordinators must have a strong foundation of knowledge and experience with digital computer systems and a desire to always learn more and creative ways to use technology. Video coordinators must also possess a working understanding of football, an ability to communicate effectively with coaches and solid organizational skills in a business where the pressure and demands runs high and the clock moves swiftly.

In fact, it’s no longer fair to call that video coordinator down the hall the department’s “computer geek.” Instead, the best video coordinators should probably have their titles changed to “assistant coach/video and technology.”

“Before Brad came, I was in charge of the video exchange with our opponents. I was the one who was in charge of getting the video copied. We had one camera, and I’ve seen better home cameras than the ones we had,” Gale says. “Now, it’s evolved to where we have a full-time video coordinator, full-time graduate assistants, four or five student assistants, video editing monitors and set-ups in each of our staff rooms.

“When we want to look at a cut-up, ‘boom,’ we look at a cut-up. We come in off the practice field our practice field is ready to go. There’s no waste of time and we’re able to get so much more done. The technology has taken us places we never imagined 8-10 years ago.”

Or, as Marshall head coach Bob Pruett says, “It’s almost impossible to measure what it’s meant to our success.”

The same can be said of Helton’s impact on the program. It’s not enough to say Helton is one of the most respected video coordinators in college football or a three-time winner of the College Sports Video Coordinators Mid-American Conference Video Director of the Year award. It’s more important to know that he makes a difference in what Thundering Herd fans see on the field on Saturdays.

“You have to take pride in what you do to have pride in anything, and Brad takes tremendous pride in his work,” Pruett says. “He works hard to achieve a high level of efficiency and I really think we have the best video in the league.”

It wasn’t always that way at Marshall. In fact, when Helton first started working at Marshall, the football program, then coached by Jim Donnan, was a successful Division I-AA program looking toward the possibility of a transition to Division I-A. At the time, Helton was working at a local TV station when Donnan approached him two weeks before the 1995 season and asked him if he wanted to start shooting games and practices. Helton had not played football since he was 12, but he had played some college baseball, wanted to find a way to stay involved in sports in some way and figured it was a free ticket to the game, so he accepted the job.

“At the time, I had absolutely no idea what was involved in the job,” Helton said. “In TV, you shoot a lot of sports, but you’re on the fringe and you really don’t have any idea what goes on in the inside. Once I figured it out, though, I felt like this was something I could really get into.”

Unfortunately for Helton, just when he found something he wanted to do, he had to worry about getting a chance to do it again. Donnan left for Georgia after that season, bringing in a new coaching staff with its own ideas. Fortunately for Helton, that new coach, Bob Pruett, had every intention of making a commitment to video technology and offered the job to Helton.

“That was one of the areas we were really deficient in and we needed to get better in that area because we didn’t have the means or the equipment here to get to the level of efficiency we needed to be able to function as a team,” Pruett says. “We didn’t have a full-time video person. We didn’t have the proper equipment.”

Hiring Helton as a full-time video coordinator was the first important step toward making a serious commitment toward improving in that area. But while Pruett insists “We were fortunate to get Brad on board full-time, because he’s done a wonderful job for us,” Helton is quick to admit, “I just sort of fell into it, and learned on the fly.”

Fly is the key word here, because Helton has witnessed tremendous growth in the industry during his time at Marshall, with new technology flying faster and farther than Helton ever imagined.

“We had a couple of cameras and a couple of VRCs and the cameras were typical of what you’d see guys shoot weddings or home movies with,” Helton says. “I just started making a list of everything we needed and decided what we needed to address to get better and get the coaches what they wanted quicker.”

While many of today’s younger coaches grew up with VCRs, CD-Roms, desktop computers and lap-tops, coaching veterans such as Pruett can remember a time when using game or practice film was a tedious, consuming process that involved long hours of developing tape, searching for the right frames, splicing and piecing the frames together and then watching 30 minutes of video to watch the right three or four plays.

Even as recently as the mid- to late-1990s, videotape meant coaches no longer had to cut and splice tape. It also gave them more angles to study, such as sideline and endzone, but the videotapes still presented a lot of limitations.

The arrival of digital video changed all that because it allowed coaches to see game and practice films on multiple levels. Practice video is saved directly to a digital disc that allows a wide range of flexibility. Want to see how an opponent defends short-yardage situations? Want to see all of a teams pass plays out of the spread formation? A coach can now ask for plays by type (run or pass), down, distance, formation, hash mark and other factors.

“They come up with an idea, we pop it out for them,” Helton says. “That was a big selling point on going to a digital system. We could say the coaches are taking X amount of time to do this, but some of our opponents are doing this and their coaches are only using X amount of time to do the same thing, and that’s an advantage they gain when they’re preparing for you. If a coach is doing something he doesn’t need to be doing, then he’s not in the meeting room or calling recruits or doing whatever he needs to be done. It’s allowed our coaches to make more efficient use of their time.”

At Marshall, Helton uses digital videodiscs for coaches. Add Microsoft PowerPoint and Word and other useful software applications, and it’s an effective use of technology with plenty of bang for the buck.

“PowerPoint has been huge for us,” Helton says. “Our coaches put still drawings of plays and then run cut-ups in behind them. We marry those with digital system so the coaches can go through the diagram of the play, then watch the diagram play itself out, and then show a few clips of it. It’s great for installing, for training, for a lot of things coaches are doing.”

Helton also prepares specific DVDs for coaches on the recruiting trail. If a coach is recruiting a quarterback, that coach can bring a laptop or mini-DVD players to the school or home, pop in a DVD and show game highlights and information of the program’s offensive system.

“There’s a lot of new technology out there and it’s coming so quickly,” Helton says. “It’s a part-time job in and of itself just trying to stay in touch with where the technology is going. I’m excited to see what’s going to happen over the next five years, because really, there seems to be no limit to where the technology is going.”

Staying on top of the changes and advances in technology is a constant challenge.

“That’s part of what makes this job fresh, is not only knowing what you’ve got to do to get better but also learning what everybody else is using against you,” Helton says. “You know what you’ve got and what you’re doing, but what are your opponents doing?”

Getting involved with the Collegiate Sports Video Association has been a major positive for Helton and other video directors, because, like coaches, it allows them to learn from each other and pass that knowledge along to others.

“You’ve got 117 Division I-A schools,” Helton says, “so you’ve probably got 115 different set-ups to achieve the same objective. That’s why I talk to a lot of guys at the bigger schools where they have a lot of toys and technology, and a lot of guys at the smaller schools who are working their butts off to keep up and finding other ways to get the job done. I get as much good stuff from the guys at the smaller schools as I do from the bigger schools because they find a way. It’s just like with football: find a way.”

Another constant challenge is to balance budget restrictions with the need for growth, expansion and improvement.

“We’re in a position here where we don’t have all the money and resources some programs have,” Helton says, “so we’ve always had to identify our priorities and attack that way. We’ve had some roadblocks along the way, times when we didn’t have the money to do things we wanted, or times when we had to finance others over two or three years. But we’re always trying to push forward and beat the system by making the most of what we have. To be honest, it’s been much more rewarding to have built something from nothing than to just walk into a full room of new toys.”

It’s also been rewarding to work with a supportive coach who not only understands the need for cutting-edge technology, but isn’t afraid to push for the money and support to get the job done. In fact, on the day AFM contacted Pruett for an interview, he had just returned from a meeting with his athletic director to ask for more funds for the video department.

“Honestly, I couldn’t have picked a better coach than Coach Pruett to have worked for from that aspect,” Helton says. “He lets you do your job. He puts people in the positions he wants them and if he doesn’t have to worry about it, then you’re doing your job. If he’s got to start worrying about it, it doesn’t benefit the program because he’s having to oversee your job as well.

“He’s also gone to bat for our video department more times than I can imagine, as far as ‘hey, we need this and this is why we need this.’ In a time where you have a lot of Title IX issues and other financial issues, video might not be at the top of the list he’s always supported us and pushed for us to get what we need.”

In many ways, especially their common struggle to meet high expectations and then new set new goals, Helton has learned that he has a lot in common with the coaches. For one thing, he takes tremendous pride in winning. The losses, even though they are usually few and far between at Marshall, still hurt.

“When we lose, we’re all here late Sunday night, bunkered down together,” Helton says. “And when you win, you’ve got to work even harder to stay there.

“I always feel like part of the staff here. Coach Pruett has always treated me as part of the staff. There’s never been a separation. We’re all in this together. We eat together, we travel together, we play golf together, we spend a lot of time together. I talk to guys at other schools who feel there’s that separation, like they’re at the bottom of a pyramid, but it’s not that way here. They give me a lot of respect, but that respect goes both ways because I have a lot of respect for the job they do.”

He’s also learned a lot about managing his own staff from observing the coaching staff.

“I learned it all from Coach Pruett,” Helton says. “Find out what they do, what they do well, send them to do it, and it frees you to spend more time making the program better and gaining an edge. That’s what Coach Pruett does and it works here.”

At the same time, Helton also knows he doesn’t have to be a coach to do his job effectively, and the coaches don’t expect him to be a football expert.

“They’ve got to have more football knowledge than a lot of people think - at least in our case,” Gale says. “I can’t speak for every school in America, but he’s got to have enough knowledge to understand what we’re talking about and be able to teach it to the people working for him.”

Knowing one formation or drill from another is important for targeting the right video, but it’s more important to be able to communicate effectively with the coaches and understand their needs. That’s been a challenge at times for Helton because of Marshall’s multiple offensive coordinators under Pruett.

“I’ve picked up a lot of football along the way and I learn a little more every year,” Helton says, “but to be honest when they start to get real technical about football, I sort of tune it out because it all it does is clutter your mind from what you’re trying to accomplish. I know how to get them what they need, how to get a feel for what they’re looking for.”

Instead of trying to be a football expert, Helton knows he is better off trying to be the best video coordinator he can be.

“You feel like you’re making a contribution,” Helton says. “At times you feel like you’re a big part of it, but at times you don’t feel like you’re that big a part of it because it can be nice to be behind the scenes and not really be seen. The coaches put in a lot of hours and do a lot of work and if you can help them work more efficiently and let them do things they weren’t able to do before, it translates on to the field because the coaches and the players are better prepared.”

No perfect way to do it – compare notes with video coordinators’ association through phone calls, e-mails and instant messagers.

Collegiate Sports Video Association

“You’ve got 117 Division I-A schools,” Helton says, “so you’ve probably got 115 different set-ups to achieve the same objective. That’s why I talk to a lot of guys at the bigger schools where they have a lot of toys and technology, and a lot of guys at the smaller schools who are working their butts off to keep up and finding other ways to get the job done. I get as much good stuff from the guys at the smaller schools as I do from the bigger schools because they find a way. It’s just like with football: find a way.”

Against The Grain
by Richard Scott






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