You will not find Ian Andersen battling for the puck during a faceoff or skating furiously to help kill a power play, but he is still a major contributor to his team’s success. As video coordinator for the Minnesota Wild of the National Hockey League, Andersen works his magic with a hard drive instead of a hockey stick.

Andersen is one of scores of video coordinators among the collegiate and professional ranks who use the latest tech tools to give their teams a competitive edge.

“Having the ability at my fingertips to quickly access a given play is huge”, says Andersen, who uses three 250-GB Maxtor OneTouch II external hard drives to archive and back up video from dozens of games. “Having all that storage capacity at my disposal allows me to find a certain game or play and quickly get it into the hands of our coaching staff, so they are better prepared for our next opponent.”

In addition to the Maxtor OneTouch II drives, Andersen also uses a 160-GB Seagate Portable Hard Drive, which is the ideal size for carrying in a rucksack or a briefcase. “I love this drive,” he says. “Its size is awesome and great to travel with. It is easy to set up and I love the fact that it is powered from my laptop computer. I hate having to bring along yet another AC adapter for all of my other hard drives.”

Andersen accompanies the Wild at home and on the road, where he sits near the team’s bench, equipped with a Dell Latitude laptop computer. Andersen captures and digitises game footage in real time, using video editing software from XOS Technologies. He can then show the footage to the team’s coaches during a break between periods, enabling them to make adjustments to their game plans.

“The action happens very fast on the ice, and it is easy to miss things”, says Andersen, “but the computer catches everything. If a coach wants to know why a play broke down, I can show him exactly what happened.”

Matt Fox, video coordinator for the University of California at Berkeley’s nationally ranked American football team, also relies on Seagate storage solutions in his job with the Golden Bears. Fox uses three workstations, each equipped with 160-GB Maxtor DiamondMax 10 hard drives, to quickly process about three hours of video footage captured from the team’s daily practices.

Hockey action is fast and furious, but the Wild’s computers do not miss a single play.

In just 10-to-15 minutes, he can assemble clips of the offense, defense and special teams for coaches and players to review and study.

“In the old days, when everyone was using videotape, it would take an hour or more to put everything together for the coaches and our players”, Fox explains. “Now that everything is digital, the accessibility is a lot easier. Anything our team needs—whether it’s red zone plays, wide-receiver sets, defensive schemes, you name it—I can just click on it and pull it together in a fraction of the time.”

Fox also uses Seagate’s 6-GB Pocket Hard Drive and 120-GB Portable Hard Drive to back up the team’s video footage and transfer that content from his Mac G5 computer to the coaching staff’s Dell laptops.

“We are not networked to a central server when we go on the road, so having the ability to quickly transport footage from my system and load them onto our coaches’ PCs is fantastic”, says Fox.

He also uses the Pocket Hard Drive to transfer a variety of digitised highlight clips to the team’s marketing department, which uploads the video onto the team’s website for fans to enjoy, and since Seagate’s products are compatible with both the Mac and PC platforms, set-up is a breeze.

“It was very intuitive,” Fox says. “I did not even use the set-up discs that came with them.”

Fox says the performance and reliability of Seagate’s products have “more than met” his high expectations.

“My job is all about giving our coaches and players the information they need to win”, says Fox, who is in his fifth season at Cal. “We generate a ton of storage from practices and actual games, so these hard drives are very important to our team’s success. I would hate to go back to anything else.”

One of the most innovative uses of storage in sports comes from Major League Baseball’s Colorado Rockies. This year, the team began using Apple Computer’s hard drive-enabled video iPod to help players refine their swings and pitches. A 60-GB iPod can hold up to 150 hours of video, enough capacity for five seasons of a player’s “greatest hits”.

Fifteen of the Rockies’ players, mostly hitters, now carry iPods, using them to study their performances against pitchers they have had success with—and those who have given them trouble at the plate. A few of the team’s pitchers also use the devices to scout opposing batters.

The iPods serve as a highly portable version of the team’s video room at Denver’s Coors Field, which now features 11 terabytes of networked storage—increased from a single terabyte in 2002.

“Hard drives are vital to everything we do”, says Brian Jones, assistant video coordinator for the Rockies, who updates players’ iPods every week. “The technology is a major part of the game now.”

Jones, who also uses Seagate’s Portable Hard Drive to store MPEG-4 video files for the Rockies, has fielded calls from several other ball clubs about implementing the iPod for their players.

“Todd Helton (First baseman) likes his iPod a lot”, Jones says. “He has every hit since 2000 stored on it. Baseball is such a difficult game. If a player is struggling, he can pull out his iPod and go back to a particular month or week of the season when he was playing well, to get into the right frame of mind for the next game.”