Cal quarterback Nate Longshore

Will the Cal football Bears have a great season? The answer may lie in part with the performance of some “players” from Seagate who never get on the field.

It's third down, late in the fourth quarter and Nate Longshore, quarterback for the University of California at Berkeley, drops back to pass, needing a touchdown to help seal a win. Suddenly, a defensive linebacker swoops in and drops Longshore to the turf, killing the Golden Bears' momentum. Why did the play break down? Which players missed their assignments?

For the answers to these and other questions, Matt Fox, the football team's video coordinator, turns to Seagate®. Fox uses an array of Seagate hard drives to store, manage and share every play from the Bears' games and practices. With just a few keystrokes, Fox can easily access and edit selected plays and load that video on the coaching staff's laptops, helping prepare the team for similar situations in the next game.

FreeAgent Scores with Scouting Service

Cal's Matt Fox isn't the only sports technologist who swears by Seagate. Gary Howard, president of NorCal Football Scouting, also relies on Seagate storage to archive massive amounts of video content. He can easily load up to 65 games on one Seagate FreeAgent Pro solution.

NorCal's camera crew captures and digitizes dozens of high-school games on the West Coast, which Howard and his staff transfer to Seagate storage products and send to colleges across the country, including Cal, USC and Notre Dame. Once the teams have downloaded the footage to their systems, they just mail the FreeAgent solutions back to NorCal's headquarters in Windsor, California.

"If a program like Cal is interested in 200 of the top high-school players, we'll film their games so their coaches don't have to try and be everywhere," Howard says.

Howard tried competing storage brands and was disappointed with how some of those products read data, among other problems. He purchased several FreeAgent Pro solutions earlier this year and hasn't been disappointed. While reliability is a key factor for Howard, he was equally attracted to Seagate's unique industrial design.

"I love the orange light that tells you when the drive is functioning and loading data," Howard says. "It's easy to see that a lot of thought went into designing a product that would stand apart from the rest of the pack—and hold up to the demands we put on them."

Game Changers
"Hard drives have changed everything," says Fox, who's in his sixth season with Cal. "There's no question the technology has made my job easier."

Matt Fox uses an array of Seagate solutions in his job as Cal's video coordinator.

Fox uses several Seagate internal and external storage products, including a 750-GB FreeAgent™ Pro solution, a 160-GB Maxtor OneTouch® 4 Mini solution, a 120-GB Portable Hard Drive, a 6-GB Pocket Hard Drive and three 160-GB Seagate desktop hard drives.

Each drive serves a specific purpose for the team's needs. For instance, Fox stores dozens of high-school games on the FreeAgent Pro solution (see box). The team's coaches will later study that footage to evaluate prospective recruits. Fox uses the Pocket Hard Drive to transfer game video to the school's marketing department, which will upload that footage to the university's website for fans to enjoy. And he uses both the Portable Hard Drive and the Maxtor OneTouch 4 Mini solution when traveling with the team.

"We don't always have access to our network when we're on the road," says Fox. "Both Seagate products are a great solution for moving media from my laptop to our coaching staff's computers, without any hassle."

Seagate storage products give Cal's coaches an edge in game planning.

Technology Edge
"Matt's been a big key to our success," says Cal wide-receivers coach Dan Ferrigno. "His ability to get video into our hands in the format and depth that we need saves us a tremendous amount of time and gives us an edge in our game-planning."

Fox says the fact that he uses so many different Seagate products for storage and backup is a reflection of his confidence in the brand's reliability and performance.

"I've found other drives had problems syncing quickly to my PC, for instance, or were poorly designed, where the USB cable wouldn't attach securely," he says. "I haven't had any of those problems with Seagate. The biggest factor for me by far is reliability. We move our storage products around constantly, and they tend to get banged around quite a bit. Seagate has the most rugged products I've seen."