How to Improve the Audio on Your Highlight Tape

If you have aspirations of getting recruited to play college lacrosse, you should be making a highlight tape.

In fact, you should be making multiple highlight tapes to let coaches see you play and progress over time.

In this post I want to show you a cool way to enhance that highlight tape with superior audio quality.

Pretty much every highlight tape up I’ve seen up until now uses the audio from the camera on the sidelines which doesn’t pick up the goalies voice at all.

Even worse it picks up tons of wind noise and if the goalie doesn’t add some sort of background music on top of the video, it can be painful to listen to.

Improving the audio on your highlight reels is going to be especially useful for those goalies who excel in their communication with the defense.

While this tip is specifically written up for us lacrosse goalies, any position that relies on communication to excel could benefit from this all well.

Check out these 2 highlight tapes from a high school goalie Michael Piotrowski that I recently had on podcast episode #68.

What’s the first thing you notice?

You can actually hear his communication.

Michael discussed it on the podcast:

 

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@creaseking_ Michael Piotrowski joins the podcast to discuss recruiting, his tips for bigger goalies, Midwest lacrosse, and this spicy tip to improve your highlight reel. Full episode link in the bio.

A post shared by Coach Damon – Lax Goalie Coach (@laxgoalierat) on Aug 18, 2020 at 5:23am PDT

What a great idea! Adds another element to these goalie highlight reels and it especially helps you stand out if communication is a strong element of your game (and it should be).

How to Install the Microphone in your Chest Pad

Michael put together a demo video on his IG CreaseKing:

 

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Here’s a quick little video on how I am able to get audio in my film. It’s fairly simple to set up. We use the Pixel Voical Air microphones. They can be found on Amazon. The microphone piece just slips right into the pocket on the inside of my chest pad and the receiver plugs into the camera. That’s really all these is too it. Hoped this helped. Please DM me with any further questions.

A post shared by Crease King (@creaseking_) on Aug 26, 2020 at 3:13pm PDT

To get this setup, the first thing you’ll need is a wireless lavalier microphone.

Here’s the one Michael uses:

You then need to sew in a little pocket on the inside of your chest to pad that will hold the microphone.

I’m no crochet expert but a few stitches on any type of cloth should suffice to create a sturdy little pocket that can hold the mic securely.

Then all you need to do is plug the receiver end, which is a separate piece, directly into the camera doing the recording.

I asked Michael if he has ever been in the chest pad on the microphone part and his response was:

I have been hit in the chest a couple of times with it in and it has yet to break.

So good news is it looks like this microphone is durable to withstand some direct impact.

Pretty simple and yet takes the audio quality on your highlight reels from basically non-existent, all the way up to awesome.

Review Your Communication

The other thing I love about having great audio on your video footage is the ability to review your communication.

Just like I recommend goalies record video of themselves making saves to review their save technique, the same now can be done with your verbal commands.

You might think you’re being crystal clear in your communication to your team only to listen to a scrambled mess when you review the tape.

The audio don’t lie.

If you can’t clearly hear your commands, make you to actively work on improving your communication in the crease.

Conclusion

Super quick post on an awesome idea I learned from CreaseKing Michael Piotrowski on our podcast episode together about improving audio quality on your highlight reels.

If communication is an area of the game you excel at, you’ll stand out more in the eyes of college coaches when they can hear your crisp and confident commands while watching your game footage.

Having great audio also serves as a tool which we can review. The audio don’t lie.

If you sound like a jumbled mess on the audio, guess what your team is likely hearing? I hope you said a jumbled mess, cause that’s the right answer.

Don’t be a jumbled mess. Be clear, be loud, be confident!

Until next time,
Coach Damon

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