LRS Sports Recruiting Services has expanded its reach both technologically and geographically. The company, which evaluates student athletes who meet college-football-program standards, has doubled its geographic coverage to keep tabs on high school players in six Southeastern states. It has also equipped its recruiters with high-definition Canon cameras, so its library of game and player video looks sharper than ever.
LRS recruiters are out in the field most Friday nights, taping football games at high schools throughout Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, and South Carolina on high-definition Canon cameras. The recruiters then convert the recordings to WMV files and upload them to LRS Sports’ HP production server. Before uploading, the HDV files are downconverted to standard-definition quality to save on the amount of time that it takes to upload.
“They can get the games uploaded that same evening that they shoot, so it’s available for download by our customers quickly,” says Dan McCain, senior manager of LRS Sports. “The video is also available via DVD. Since we still have some schools in outlying areas that have issues with downloading, we do send out DVDs to colleges as well.”
The HP production server has more than 2 TB of space, so LRS is able to store plenty of video of the states’ most promising athletes. A SQL server then indexes the collected video, categorizing it by state, team colors, game date, and national high school ID number.
“We’re coming out with new software for the recruiting side of it that ties the kids to the videos,” McCain says. “For any recruit that you’re interested in, you can go in and see exactly how many videos we have on them, whether they’re full games or highlights, and so forth.”
Colleges pay an annual subscription fee to purchase both data and video or just data on the recruits LRS follows. Data includes points like 40-yard-dash times and bench-press maximums, much of which is acquired at the combines that LRS holds independently in Florida and Georgia.
“We’re finding that most schools get the video associated with that data as well,” McCain says. “My recruiters actually see every one of these kids come through, meet the kids, and understand a little bit more about them. We’re much more hands-on than other places that just get lists of the athletes.”
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