At Mater Dei High School in Santa Ana, California, the margins are thin. The Monarchs are one of the most consistently ranked programs in the country, a team that has held the national No. 1 spot and plays a schedule built to test it. When every opponent is good, the advantage comes from seeing the game faster than the other sideline does.

Mater Dei has run SkyCoach since 2017. What changed this season isn’t the video. It’s who has to be standing there making the system work.

THE JOB NOBODY PUTS ON A DEPTH CHART

Every replay system that attaches data to film needs someone to enter that data. Down. Distance. Yard line. Play after play, at game speed, with no chance to catch up if you fall behind.

It sounds like clerical work. It isn’t. Logging a play correctly means knowing what you just watched, which means the job goes to someone who understands football. On most staffs that’s a coach, and that coach is now looking at a screen instead of the field.

For a program carrying a full staff, that’s one more body committed to the booth. For a program that doesn’t, it’s a job that either gets done badly or doesn’t get done.

WHAT CHANGED THIS SEASON

AI Assist now captures the situational data on its own as the game happens. Down, distance, yard line, hash and gain or loss are attached to each clip without anyone entering them.

For Greg Oldham, who has been at Mater Dei for nearly two decades and runs the school’s SkyCoach setup, the change shows up in staffing before it shows up anywhere else.

“SkyCoach is the best sideline replay system by far,” said Greg Oldham of Mater Dei High School in Santa Ana, California. “The addition of AI has simplified the usage and provides real-time data while freeing up a coach who traditionally had to enter data into the system. The SkyCoach AI has been a huge time-saver, and we no longer need an experienced person who understands down, distance, and yard line controlling the system.”

That last part is the one worth sitting with. The job didn’t get easier. It stopped requiring a football mind.

WHAT THE STAFF DOES INSTEAD

Freeing someone up only matters if there’s better work for them to do, and there is. The basics, like down, distance and yard line, are the part a machine can handle. Play categorization is not. Knowing that a look was a spread formation running a smash concept out of the pistol, and tagging it against your own terminology, still takes someone who knows the offense.

So the football knowledge on staff moves to the part of the job that actually needs it, and the clerical part stops consuming a coach for four quarters.

It also means the data is complete. A person logging plays by hand misses some: during a scoring drive, a personnel change, an injury timeout. Automatic capture doesn’t have bad stretches.

WHY IT MATTERS MORE AT THIS LEVEL

Mater Dei’s game-day setup is not small. In a 2025 interview, Oldham described a large sideline TV alongside seven iPads on the sideline and four more in the press box, putting multiple angles in front of coaches and players within seconds of the whistle.

The more screens and the more people involved, the more the data layer has to hold up. Replay that works but arrives untagged is just video. Replay with the situation attached is something a coordinator can actually query between series: what are they running on third and medium, what did they do the last time we showed this front.

Oldham described the payoff in an earlier interview, before the AI capture arrived: “In the past, we’d have to ask our kids ‘What did you see out there?’ and hope to piece it together. SkyCoach has improved that process so we can be quick and efficient — making adjustments on offense, defense and special teams.”

A SYSTEM THEY KEEP CHOOSING

Mater Dei has access to Hudl Sideline as part of a bundled package. They don’t use it.

“We have the Hudl system — it comes with the package — but we choose not to use it because SkyCoach is so good,” Oldham said in that same earlier interview. “The SkyCoach support team, it’s a million to one versus Hudl with the SkyCoach support.”

That’s a program paying for one system and running another by choice, which is a harder endorsement to give than a testimonial. For programs weighing the same decision, the SkyCoach and Hudl comparison lays out where the two differ on the sideline.

WHAT AI ASSIST CAPTURES AUTOMATICALLY

• Down and distance on every play, without manual entry
• Yard line and hash, attached to the clip
• Gain or loss on every play, so the result travels with the film

Staff time then goes to play categorization and team terminology, the tagging that takes football knowledge, rather than the situational basics. The 2026 game day changes cover how the rest of the workflow shifted this season.

THE POINT OF THE WHOLE THING

Mater Dei didn’t adopt AI Assist to be early on anything. They adopted it because it took a job off the staff without taking anything off the film.

For a program that has run the same replay system since 2017 through coaching changes, schedule changes and a national profile that keeps rising, that’s the standard a new feature has to clear: it has to make Friday night simpler without making the information worse.