It's been a few years since I stopped playing rugby and I struggled to remember games during a season, never mind 10-15 years later! My mind is a patchwork of moments at best. This is why I started creating video montages to celebrate the team's season and player contributions for our annual awards night.

At this point many of us may be thinking that this sounds very time intensive and not achievable. This is exactly why you need to keep reading as I want to SHARE SOME TIPS to lighten the load by engaging your players in the process.

First up, here are the types of videos I create, with examples of the complete videos below.

Season Highlights

A nice way to kick off the night and to remind the players what success looks like, it also gives them something they can share with others and to go back to in the future.

Try of the Season

This is voted for on the night and is a great way to raise some money, excite the players and connect the non-players to the night.

Individual Player Awards

Provides the players awarded with a nice memory of their achievement.

Lighten the Load

I ask the players to provide me with the clips for all these videos. For the 'Season Highlights' and 'Try of the Season' videos I create a playlist for each video that the players can access and add clips to. I ask them to send me their favourite moments or if they want to win Try of the Season then send me that clip. It's important to give a deadline well in advance so it doesn't end up a mad rush, if they don't get their clips in by the deadline then they don't get included.

I then work through the playlists and copy the clips that make the final cut to a couple of new playlists I create that are private to me and the other coaches. It's then a case of checking over with the other coaches and finally ordering and downloading the videos.

It's worth noting that because we clip all our games into key areas and I encourage players to label any highlights throughout the season that the task of finding the highlights and tries is made easier.

In previous years I have done the Player Award videos myself but this year I am going to ask that players send me their choice of player along with video clips to support their choice, they are also allowed to nominate themselves. The players will send me these clips and nominations through the Feed and I will then add the relevant clips to a private playlist, order and download.

Finishing Touches

This is not necessary but I do like to add title and end images, which I create using Canva. I really like Canva, it's free to use and allows me to create great content throughout the season. I also use iMovie as I like to add music, change the speed of clips and zoom in to capture moments of top skills and celebrations. I find iMovie a bit slow, so I think I'll try Canva for the video editing side of things this year too.

I hope this is useful guidance on how you can make video a big part of your end of season awards and more importantly provide the players with a lasting memory.

Cheers

Mark