The coach who films everything and watches when he can

Mike Hungerford left a coaching career he thought he’d never give up. What he brought with him was a belief that video changes how players learn and how coaches teach. At Mad Dog Lacrosse, he’s putting that belief to work across 160 coaches and a sport that’s growing faster than the infrastructure around it.

Mike Hungerford grew up in Farmingdale, New York, went to school there, and eventually became one of only four head coaches the football and lacrosse program had seen since 1964. He replaced a coach who was in the US Lacrosse Hall of Fame. He never planned to leave.

Then Tommy Dera, the founder of Mad Dog Lacrosse, offered him a job. He packed up, moved to San Diego, and started again. He is now the National Boys Director of Player Development at Mad Dog, a club with roughly 160 full-time and part-time coaches spread across regional, elite, and national programs.

He calls it the best job he’s ever had. But getting here required letting go of something he’d spent three decades building.

What football taught him about lacrosse

The football coaching background matters more than you might expect. Football stops every four to six seconds. You rewind, regroup, and go again. The game is built for film. Players and coaches at every level use video as a standard tool for preparation and review, and Hungerford absorbed that culture early.

When he started coaching lacrosse seriously, he carried the habit with him. Lacrosse is a flow sport, closer to hockey or soccer than to football, but the underlying logic still applied. If you can watch what you’re doing, you can understand it better.

He started looking at how soccer coaches structured training. He studied what they measured, how they built drill banks, how they used video to prepare players before sessions rather than only to review what went wrong afterward.

Hungerford says the footage has a way of exposing assumptions. “You think your drill is serving a purpose. And then when you actually step back from coaching it, get video, go back and watch, count certain things in certain actions. You learn a lot about your coaching and what you need to do better.”

He had been filming with a drone in New York. When he moved to California and took on a high school coaching role the drone was still there but the limitations were obvious. Batteries ran out. Someone had to fly it. It needed attention.

The case for just recording everything

What Hungerford wanted was simple in concept. Record everything. Come back later. Find what you need. He searched around and landed on Veo.

The cost argument was immediate. Filming a single high school game through an outside service ran to $150 or $200. With back-to-back JV and varsity games on the same night, that was $300 to $400 out of a public school fundraising budget. Over a 16-game season, it became a significant line item. For a lot of programs, it stopped there.

But Hungerford was also interested in something less obvious. With a fixed building camera, you get the angle you have. Move to a different field, play in the evening sun, run a late-season game at an unfamiliar venue, and the quality shifts. You cannot reposition a camera that’s bolted to a wall.

Veo changed that. He filmed from the press box, from the bench side, and a few times from the end zone, just to see how it looked. The portability gave him options. The setup took sixty seconds. The camera ran the whole session, and the film was there on the other end.

He describes it the same way to anyone considering the purchase. “It’s like adding someone to your staff where you don’t have to worry about the film. You charge it, go. It’s never run out of battery once for me.”

Building a drill bank that coaches can actually use

The game film was useful. But practice film was where Hungerford found something less expected.

One of his priorities at Mad Dog is building a drill bank for coaches across the program. Not a folder of diagrams. A library of actual footage showing what a drill looks like when it’s working, and sometimes when it isn’t. A coach in a different state can watch the same drill on video rather than trying to interpret a paper diagram, and the difference in how quickly they pick it up is significant.

But the practice film also revealed something about the drills themselves. Hungerford started counting touches. How many times was a given player actually handling the ball in a 12-minute session? How many times was a lesser-skilled player getting the repetitions they needed to develop? The results were sometimes surprising.

The results were sometimes surprising, he says. “You find out that some drills are very much accomplishing what you want. But then some drills are accomplishing something different, not what you originally intended. And it’s like, wow.”

The same logic he had applied to football, counting assignments, tracking execution, reviewing after the fact, translated directly into lacrosse development. The camera did not require him to be present during review. He filmed the drill on Thursday night, watched it on Sunday, and adjusted the session plan for the following week.

Getting film to players before it goes stale

At the club level, the timing of film access matters more than many coaches realize. Hungerford made the comparison directly. Watching a movie on opening weekend is a different experience than watching it three weeks later when everyone around you already knows how it ends.

Film from a tournament that arrives two and a half weeks after the fact sits differently with players. The game is less fresh. The emotional context has shifted. The learning that happens in the immediate window after competition, when players are still processing what went right and what didn’t, is harder to access.

With Veo, film is available quickly. He can share it with players the same day. He can send a drill to kids before the next practice so they arrive already knowing what it should look like. He noted that players who watched themselves from the previous session came to training with more focus and more engagement than those who had not.

He expresses it simply. “Kids love to watch themselves. When they have the ability to watch themselves, they’re going to tune in. They’ll tune into themselves more than they will a stranger.”

It extended to the JV players as well. Filming the lower-level games alongside varsity sent a message to those athletes and their families that they were part of the program, not a footnote to it. Parents noticed. The feedback was good.

A sport growing faster than it can coach itself

Lacrosse is expanding rapidly outside its traditional base in the Northeast and Maryland. Texas, California, and other non-traditional states are seeing growth driven by relocating families, changing demographics, and kids who are discovering the sport without the generational pipeline that exists in older lacrosse communities.

The players are arriving. The coaches are not keeping pace.

Hungerford met coaches in San Antonio who were passionate about the sport but came from baseball or football backgrounds and were learning lacrosse alongside their players. They could coach athletes. They understood practice structure and player development. What they needed was a faster way to learn the game itself.

He puts it directly. “Seeing a diagram and seeing it on video are two very different things. You can accelerate people’s learning.”

That is what his drill bank is designed to address. A coach in a developing region does not need to have played lacrosse at a high level to run a good practice. They need to see what good looks like. Video makes that possible in a way that no printed resource can match.

His concern is that cost and access become the limiting factor before the sport has a chance to build that infrastructure. Equipment is already a significant investment for families new to the game. Adding expensive filming requirements on top of that pushes some families out before they have had the chance to decide if the sport is right for their kid.

He comes back to his own story. “When I was 13, Mike Hungerford could always play club lacrosse. But now, could he? I want the next kid in Farmingdale to have that same chance.”

He is not anti-technology. He is the opposite. He wants more of it, accessible to more people, at a price point that does not become another barrier in a sport that already asks a lot of families financially.

That is the framing he brings to every conversation about video in lacrosse. The camera should expand the sport. The film should reach the kids who need it most, including the ones on the JV roster, in the rec program, or in a gym in San Antonio where a football coach is figuring out lacrosse on the fly.