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AFM Magazine


So You Want to be a Video Coordinator

UCLA\'s Ken Norris on the position
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“There aren’t too many positions available-there are 117 in Division I, 32 in NFL, and that’s it. (Smaller) schools usually don’t have enough money. It’s an extremely important position, but you’ve got to provide a decent product. Some schools provide terrible video.

“There are chances to get into a job like this, but it’s tough to crack into (the business). You can’t go to school to be a video coordinator. I was lucky to know (former UCLA film coordinator) Stan Troutman who was in this position for 43 years, and have these planets line up and align.

“You have to be really bad to be fired from this job, so it’s very hard to lose this job. But you have to have a lot of patience because coaches will undoubtedly have a bad day and want to yell. I don’t get into shouting matches anymore, but in my early days I had no problem going toe-to-toe with a coach.”

UCLA’s Ken Norris describes a typical seven-day stretch during football season:

MONDAY: “We start preparing tapes for our opponents-we do this two weeks ahead of time.”

TUESDAY: “We get opponents’ tapes in and start putting them in the computer. I cut melts (tightly edited game tapes) and highlights in the computer to create potential highlight tapes for the upcoming weekend or for the year-end banquet.”

WEDNESDAY: We’re still putting stuff in the computer, but we’re also breaking stuff down to index it for the coaches. Upstairs, the graduate assistants are entering in data based on the plays-such as field position, down and distance, the offensive personnel, the formation, the play they run. Then the graduate assistants will look at the defense-things like the front, the defense they are in, stunts and blitzes, where the linebackers are positioned, the coverage of the corners and safeties, the presnap defense-the look they’re giving. Then they’ll put in the result of the play: How many yards gained or lost, whether it was a completed pass or not—yards after catch. We’ll merge that data with the video, and we’ll make our cut-ups from there. We want that done by Thursday.”

THURSDAY: “Thursdays used to be my golf day, but the coaches found out-I bragged about it too much! We’ll get stuff prepared for traveling. We have to prepare each week for a road trip because our home games are at the Rose Bowl, not on campus. Once we get the cut-ups for offense and defense ready, we’ll work on kicks (special teams). ... and we’re filming practice, during the week, too.”

FRIDAY: A light day. We fill last-minute needs and do the traveling.

SATURDAY: Game day-when we shoot a game, we shoot three ground-level cameras and record from the network truck feed. We have four angles, and that’s very time consuming. Right after the game, we edit cut-ups for offense, defense and kicks. We intercut sideline and end-zone cameras for all plays. We prepare to send these tapes out to our upcoming opponents.

SUNDAY: We prepare all the cut-ups for the coaches for next week’s opponent.






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