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AFM Magazine


Unsung Hero

Subtitle A week in the life of Tulsa’s video coordinator, Gabe Haney
by: Keith Roerdink
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A week in the life of Tulsa’s video coordinator, Gabe Haney

Good coordinators are vital to the success of any college football program. But if all you’re thinking about is the guys in charge of your offense and defense, then you’ve overlooked a key position. When time is tight and the stakes are high, you better make sure that you’ve got a top-flight video coordinator who can break down every bit of information about your opponent and your own team into bite size nuggets for your staff and players to digest.

The University of Tulsa was one of the last Division I-A football programs to add a full-time coordinator to their organization, hiring Gabe Haney three years ago. When Head Coach Steve Kragthorpe left his position as the Buffalo Bills quarterback’s coach and took over the Golden Hurricane in December of 2002, he knew that hiring someone like Haney would be one of the keys to turning around a moribund program that had won just two games in the two previous seasons.


“I hired Gabe when I first came here to Tulsa,” Kragthorpe said. “I knew Gabe from when he coached at Allen (Texas) High School. He’s a guy that loves the game of football and really loves the video side of it and that’s what you need.”

Haney became well versed in video while working as a high school coach in the Lone Star state, spending two years at West Mesquite High School and two years at Allen High School.


“In the high school coaching ranks, everybody has a side job, some guys are equipment guys, some guys are video guys and that’s kind of how it happened,” Haney said. “I wanted to do the computer video scouting my first year and nobody else did, so I took over there doing that job. After two years there, I did the same thing at Allen High School.”

At Allen, Haney ran a seven-to-10 camera operation, creating specialized ‘cut-up’ tapes for the prep playoff power that gave them a decided off-the-field edge over their competition. It was Haney’s mastery of that process, along with his association with Allen coaches Keith Patterson and Danny Philips, now Tulsa’s linebackers and defensive line coach, that eventually landed him in Oklahoma.

“It’s a very valuable position and it doesn’t receive a lot of notoriety,” Kragthorpe said. “I think those guys are really the unsung heroes of Saturday afternoon or Saturday evening. They’re going to sit in that hole and work all week long in terms of helping you develop the information you need for your game plan. And it’s vital to have someone who can do that in an expedient fashion.”

What Haney does for the Golden Hurricane is a far cry from the days of taping a game or practice on 16 millimeter film or even a Beta cam. With his state-of-the-art cameras and digital editing equipment, Haney is able to quickly and efficiently isolate every aspect of offense, defense and the kicking game, filtering the footage into a series of tapes and DVD’s that give Kragthorpe and his staff the visual learning tools to get their players ready for the upcoming game. While Haney is no longer a coach, during the season he’s logging the same long hours, working at a furious pace during the course of a week to help earn that ‘W.’

Here’s a look at Haney’s daily schedule:

SUNDAY:

If Kragthorpe and his staff haven’t taken home game tapes on Saturday night, they will come into the office Sunday morning to grade their teams’ performance from the day before. Haney and his crew of graduate assistants are busy generating tapes for Western Athletic Conference officials and their next set of opponents (teams trade tapes with everyone on their schedule as a general rule), along with breaking down the tape of their upcoming opponent.

“We’ll come in Sunday and Gabe will have the opponents videos already digitized and captured and he’ll present me with their favorite runs, favorite passes, most productive plays- run and pass- and we’ll prepare off that for a Monday practice,” said Defensive Coordinator Todd Graham, a former head coach at Allen High School prior to Haney’s arrival and a longtime proponent of video editing technology. “And you can have too much information, but he has a good idea after he’s captured the film of what a team does well and what we will have to focus on.”

The amount of ‘mark-ups’ that Haney can make on the video is mind-boggling and in working with the coaches, he can tailor the footage so that any data, no matter how specific or detailed, can be instantly retrieved and presented.

“I think the biggest thing that has changed football in the last 10-15 years is the way that you can access information,” Kragthorpe said. “You can literally get a cut-up of anything that you want. You can get 1st-and-10 from the left hash between the 20-yard lines, you can get every time they’re in an Eagle defense or every time they’re in a man-free coverage defense. It’s just incredible the information that you can access. The person that you have in that position is invaluable because they literally are the fingers that do the walking, like the old yellow pages commercial.”

For each side of the ball, 70 different data fields exist, though they are not all necessarily used.

MONDAY:

Haney’s day begins around 6 a.m. as tapes continue to get produced throughout the morning. Over 40 tapes are made for the defense and roughly 20 for the offense on average.

“After that we go into making all the different player tapes for different position groups,” Haney said. “That takes us through about 2 p.m. or 3 p.m.”

He also ships out tapes of the Golden Hurricane to the team they’ll play in two weeks. Once that’s complete, any additional specialty tapes are produced and preparations are made for the 8 p.m. practice, which Haney films from four different angles.

“That’s one of my biggest points of interaction with the coaches,” Haney said. “They have a schedule of not only what’s being done on the field collectively, but what’s being done individually in each five minute period during every practice. They fill out a schedule, it’s distributed, and then I put together a film plan for it with my five different camera people as far as what they need to be shooting. Sometimes they’re in a press box or in a scissor lift around the practice field. Sometimes they’re actually down on the field with the coach because the coach may want to get a look at a player’s feet and their footwork.”

Tapes or DVDs of practice are ready for viewing a mere 25-40 minutes after practice has finished.

TUESDAY:

Coaches review the practice tape from Monday night and supply Haney with a list of what they need on their customized tapes. This could be a shorter tape of as few as a dozen key plays that a position coach wants to emphasize with his players in a meeting.


“Different people will learn different ways and a lot of people, like myself, are visual learners and it’s very, very important to look at that information on the video and then take it to your players in the meeting room and let them have an opportunity to see,” Kragthorpe said. “As the cliché goes, a picture is worth a thousand words.”

This is also the day that tapes from the opponent in two weeks arrives. Tapes from every game that team has played are sent, so the later in the season it is, the more opponent tape there is for Haney and company to break down.

From there, it’s a similar schedule as Monday, working with the coaches and his filming crew to develop their own game plan. Haney provides his assistants with a diagram of the field and tells them when they need to film, where to film it from and what angle they’ll be filming. Unlike Monday nights’ practice, Tuesday is a two-hour, full contact session that will yield nearly 35 tapes or DVDs.

WEDNESDAY:


At midweek, Haney is developing even more customized tapes for the staff, along with some requested print outs of freeze frames from the videos that they shoot. Tulsa’s coaches will incorporate these still shots into a hard copy scouting report.

Wednesday’s practice is another full-contact session, keeping all the filmers on the run. But once again, they’re supplying the coaches with a breakdown less than an hour after the end of practice.

“With the ‘20-hour’ rule, you don’t have your players very long,” Kragthorpe said. “College football is really the least coached level of football there is in terms of your ability to have access and time with your players. So when you walk into that meeting room, you need to make sure that every bit of information that you have is in a form that you can get to your players quickly and they can process the information on the practice field and ultimately the game field on Saturday and be successful.”

The ease with which players can view either VHS tapes or DVD tapes on their own to get ready for the upcoming game is one more plus of this technology.

“Kids can study it from start to finish and that’s invaluable,” Graham said. “Kids can take it to their dorm room, some can take it on CD-Rom and watch it on their computer.”

THURSDAY:

This is the first time Haney’s crew can catch their breath. While the custom tape requests continue to roll in, the atmosphere is much more laid back. Thursday is also ‘maintenance day’ when all the cameras, equipment and VCRs are repaired and cleaned.

If the upcoming game is at home, it’s a chance to relax before filming the day’s practice. A road game means that everything that needs to be taken along gets packed up, from cameras to tapes to laptops. One final check to make sure every coach has exactly what he needs is done, as well.

Practice is typically over by 6 p.m. and Haney gets to head home shortly thereafter.

“It’s our earliest day home of the week,” Haney said. “There’s certain periods of time when you’re there a lot longer than the coaches, but it ends up washing out because in the off season when the coaches are out recruiting, you’re back in the office going home at 4:30 every day. We get here in the morning at the same time and in the evening we’re almost always here later.”

FRIDAY:

If Tulsa’s on the road, Friday is a travel day and once they’ve arrived in enemy territory, Haney is making sure that the hotel meeting rooms are set up with a VCR along with all the tapes from the previous week that coaches deemed necessary to bring along.

A home game isn’t that different, as the team still stays in a hotel the night before and Haney makes the same arrangements. In both circumstances, either he or one of his staff is always on hand during those Friday night viewings to make sure everything goes smoothly.
And as kickoff draws near, Haney can feel good about the role he played in getting the team as prepared as possible. His coaches certainly do.

“He’s as valuable to me as anybody,” Graham said. “Because I could not operate and do what we do without him. And there’s good systems and there’s bad systems and there’s good video guys and not so good video guys. And it’s hard to find one that’s been a coach.

“We’ve got a pretty good system. The key is the guy doing it and Gabe does a great job. He’s a smart guy, but he’s also a coach and he understands the teaching aspect of it.”

GAMEDAY:

All the hours of tape, all the cut-ups of themselves and their opponent has led to this day. After a few final meetings in the morning, Haney and company head over to the stadium. A home game means a three-camera set-up: one in each end zone and one in the press box. An away game gets him just one end zone plus the press box.

“In a way, it’s almost the easiest day of the week, especially for a home game, because I’ve got a crew of six kids,” Haney said. “Three are filming and three are stand-by to handle things as they come up. An away game is a little more stressful because I’m shooting one angle and someone else is shooting the other.”

Haney’s cameras are equipped with a miniature hard drive on the back of the cameras that records all the plays and can then be removed and plugged into a computer for immediate downloading.

“That’s one of the great advantages we have,” Kragthorpe said. “On the way home from the game, we’re already watching the film. I’m sitting on the plane with a laptop computer watching the game we just played an hour ago. So you can start to make the corrections in your mind and put it to bed even earlier and keep moving on.”

Another great advantage? That would be the guy with the digital editing equipment who helps make it all happen week after week, game after game, and hopefully, win after win.

From the Coach’s Mouth

If Coach Kragthorpe speaks about his video coordinator in near reverential tones, it’s because he remembers what it was like before guys like Gabe Haney were doing the things they do with technology.

“My dad’s an old coach and he would contend that technology has kind of ruined football,” Kragthorpe said with a laugh. “When he was the offensive coordinator at BYU, they’d film a 20-minute team session on a Wednesday afternoon and the coaches would get it back Friday afternoon after it was developed. Then they’d view it as a coaching staff and then with the team and then they’d go play a game. That was about all the practice film they’d watch.”

By the time the son had followed the father into the coaching ranks, it hadn’t gotten that much better.

“When I was a graduate assistant in 1988 at Oregon State, we were still utilizing 16 mm film,” Kragthorpe said. “The Pac-10 did not go to video until 1989, so you had no cut-ups. The cut-ups you made were at the end of the season were when you were self-scouting and looking at yourself in the off-season and getting ready for spring practice. You had computer sheets and data sheets, but you didn’t have any interfacing with the video like you do now.”

But Kragthorpe has seen the progression in technology as he’s progressed through the coaching ranks, with stops at Northern Arizona, North Texas, Boston College, Texas A&M and the Buffalo Bills prior to his appointment at Tulsa. To say he’s embraced it would be an understatement. Asked to rank the importance of having the latest digital editing equipment in his program, he answered ‘10’ without hesitation.

“If you don’t have it you’re getting behind, no question about it, because of the fact that your opponents have it. If you can’t scout yourself and scout them in the same manner, you’re at a competitive disadvantage. I don’t think there’s any question that it certainly helped us stay one step ahead of our opponents and again, making sure that we can be very competitive on Saturday because of the technology we utilize.”

While Haney pulls together multiple angles for Kragthorpe and his staff to view, the head coach knows which one he’d choose if he had to pick just one: the end zone.

“If I were going to buy a ticket to a football game, I’d sit in the end zone,” Kragthorpe said. “A lot of people think the best seat in the house is being down there on the field, but that’s actually the worst place to view the game from. The best place is from the end zone and I’d try to be as high as I possibly could. There you can see the adjustments the safety makes, you can see the holes that open up, you can see the passing lanes open up for a quarterback to deliver the ball, you can see the coverage zones and how people are trying to attack those zones.”









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