The world of high school athletics is highly competitive, and getting your athletes noticed by college recruiters is challenging. In today’s social media-driven world, athletes need high-quality photos from their games and matches to feed their social media presence.
With the introduction of new technologies, particularly AI-powered photo tagging and delivery systems, athletic directors now have powerful tools to centralize the gathering of photos taken by staff, parents, students, and outside photographers at games and matches and then automatically deliver photos to athletes showcasing their talents.
In this blog post, we will explore how AI-powered photo delivery platforms, utilizing facial and numbered jersey recognition, are revolutionizing the delivery of photos and videos that are more valuable than ever in the college recruitment process.
Leveraging Technology for Athlete Recruitment
Centralized Photo & Video Albums
One of the significant challenges school administrators face in today’s digital world, including athletic directors and coaches, is gathering and managing the large volume of photos and videos taken at school sporting events.
With new AI-powered, mobile-friendly platforms like WaldoSchools, you can easily create centralized, secure, cloud-based photo albums, organized in a single gallery for the year, and provide everyone in the school’s community with easy access for uploading the photos and videos they capture at games and matches, while retaining control over the publishing approval of photos.
Automatic Tagging and Sorting of Athlete Photos
Gone are the days of manually tagging and sorting photos. The most cutting-edge AI-powered platforms use facial recognition technology to automatically tag athletes in photos and WaldoSchool, as the industry’s most advanced platform leverages numbered jersey recognition as well to find, tag, and deliver action shots where faces are obstructed by helmets or otherwise not visible.
With Waldo, every time a photo is uploaded, it is instantly sorted by athlete and displayed in a student dashboard for athlete directors, coaches, and other school administrators. This dashboard is super useful for school admins in curating photos for yearbooks, slideshows, recruitment, and other marketing and communication needs.
Enhancing Athlete Visibility
One of the most significant advantages of AI-powered photo delivery is the ability to share photos with athletes in near real-time. When a new action shot of an athlete is uploaded, the platform sends instant notifications to the athlete and their families with a link to the photo.
Social media plays a crucial role in modern recruitment strategies. AI-powered platforms allow athletes to share their photos and highlight reels directly on social media, increasing their reach and visibility. By showcasing their achievements online, athletes can attract the attention of recruiters and scouts who are actively searching for talent on these platforms.
Automated Highlight Slideshows
With AI-powered platforms like WaldoSchools, an athlete’s best photos can quickly be turned into a collage-style slideshow to showcase their greatest plays throughout the season. This portfolio can be shared directly with college recruiters, giving athletes an edge in the recruiting process.
Community Building
Engaging athletes and their families is essential for community building. Pushing images and videos to your families with AI-powered, mobile delivery during and after games and matches helps build a more engaged and active community.
School Branded Images
Platforms like WaldoSchools, automatically apply a school’s brand filter to images and insert preset hashtags for Facebook posts made through the app by parents and athletes. Athletic programs can significantly increase their visibility on social media by getting game photos into the hands of athletes and parents who will in turn post them and provide the school with access to their community’s social graph.
Statistics show the collective social media reach of a school’s community is hundreds of times larger than the school’s direct social media reach.
How AI is Helping with Privacy and Security
Controlled Access and Targeted Delivery
Privacy and security are paramount when dealing with athlete’s photos. AI-powered platforms offer robust privacy settings, allowing athletic directors to control who can upload, view, and download the photos. These platforms can also be configured to only deliver the photos an athlete is found in, increasing the visibility and access for individual athletes while narrowing the access of others who shouldn’t be viewing the images.
Protected Athletes & Students
WaldoSchools, as the industry’s most advanced AI-powered photo delivery system, has two important security features. One is called Do Not Publish. Do Not Publish allows school administrators to load profiles of protected students whose images are supposed to be suppressed from yearbooks, websites, and social media.
Waldo takes these profiles, scans all images uploaded, finds the images they appear in, and automatically removes them from the album before publishing. The second feature is called, No Post to Social. No Post to Social allows parents to express their interest in keeping their student’s image off of social media. Sometimes celebrities are sensitive to social posting along with everyday parents who just choose to keep their child’s faces more private.
When a parent marks their kid as No Post to Social, the social buttons in the Waldo app are grayed out and if you tap them you are alerted someone has asked the photo not to be posted on social media.
Conclusion
AI-powered photo delivery systems, like Waldo, are transforming how high school athletes are recruited. By streamlining photo management, easing the gathering of content, pushing their photo needles out of the album haystack to each athlete, and automatically branding the images, Waldo provides athletic directors with the tools they need to help their athletes land a scholarship.
Embrace the power of AI-powered photo delivery and give your athletes their best chance to get noticed by top college recruiters.
