A few years ago, two former players walked up to me after a game and asked if I still had any of their film.
It was an alumni event. Both of them were before my time on that staff, but I knew exactly who they were — they had been good players, and they came up under the same head coach I was working for. They were back in town, came to the game, and found me afterward, and they told me they did not really have anything left from when they played. A few highlights they had hung onto over the years, and that was about it.
I was the director of player development and video coordinator for a Division I program at the time, so film was most of my job and going to look was the least I could do. I dug through the software we were using and pulled what was in there. I went through our hard drives and found some more. Then I put all of it on a thumb drive and handed it over.
That should have felt like a win. Mostly it just stuck with me. Those two had given years to that program, and their families had given right along with them, and everything left of it fit on a thumb drive I threw together in an afternoon. The day they graduated, the record of what they actually did on the floor quietly stopped being anybody’s job to keep.
Everybody has the same story
Those two alumni were not an unusual case. Once I started asking other people about their own film, I found out that almost nobody still has it.
I do not have mine either. My AAU and high school games are on a stack of CDs in a box somewhere. I grew up in a basketball family and still could not tell you which box.
The subject comes up in nearly every conversation I have about this company. I will be explaining what we do, and there is a pause, and then: man, I wish I still had my footage. Grown adults, a decade or two past their last game, and losing that film still bothers them. Different eras, same answer.
That career was never just the athlete’s, either. The whole family paid for it — the early wake-ups, the road trips, the tournament weekends that swallowed most of the summer, the money that was not really lying around. Birthdays and vacations and ordinary weekends that got skipped because somebody had to be in a gym three states away. Everyone in that house gave something up so one of them could have a real shot at it, and when it is finally over, there is usually nothing left for any of them to look back at.
Why I called an old friend
I finished up coaching and the idea still had not gone anywhere, so I called an old friend.
He and I were roommates in college and we had been passing business ideas back and forth ever since — through school and for years after it, most of them going nowhere and both of us knowing it at the time. He went the other direction from me after graduation, into computer science and then government IT work, which happens to be the exact half of this I could never have built on my own. He is the technical co-founder of Final Cut Hoops, and he built the technical foundation behind everything the company does. He played too, and he will tell you the same thing about his own film that I will about mine.
More than film
Film is where it starts, but it is not really the whole of what we are after.
A career leaves a trail behind it. There is the article somebody wrote about the record-setting game, and the stat lines, and the photos a grandparent took from the stands that the athlete never actually saw, and the videos from the back of the bus that the parents never saw. Half of it lives on one side of the gym and half of it on the other, and almost nobody ever puts the two halves together.
That is the part worth keeping. Not because it proves anything to anyone, but because twenty years from now it is what you get to show your own kids, and it is what you pull up when a friend’s kid is trying to decide whether all that work is going to pay off.
What you should walk away with
Your career, in one place, belonging to you.
Not a folder you have to go hunting for on an old laptop. Not a login on a platform that goes dark the day a program stops paying for it. A record gathered in one place, built around your career, that you can return to and share with the people who lived it with you.
You gave that sport a lot. You ought to get to keep it.