This is the mechanics, not the advice. If you are after the case for building a reel at all and what makes one worth watching, how to build a rugby highlights CV covers that. What follows is what the tools do, so you know what you are working with.
A reel is generated from tagged events, not from the raw match
The important thing to understand is that nothing here is searching the video. Every reel is built from the events recorded during analysis, and each event carries a timestamp against a specific angle. Building a reel is a matter of selecting events and cutting to them.
That is why a player with no analysed matches has no reel to generate. It is also why the tool will tell you when there is not enough to work with rather than producing a thin one.
What counts as highlight-worthy
Reels draw from a defined set of event types rather than everything recorded. Tries, positive carries, positive tackles, offloads, tackle assists, successful conversions, penalty kicks and drop kicks, passes, kicks and ruck arrivals are all eligible.
Note that negative carries and negative tackles are in that set too. That is deliberate and occasionally surprising. For a forward, a reel built only from clean breaks misrepresents the job, and the events that show a player doing unglamorous work are often the ones a coach wants to see.
The three controls
Length. Anywhere from one to ten minutes. Shorter is almost always better for anything you are sending to somebody, and the longer end exists for internal review rather than for recruitment.
Framing. Portrait or landscape. Portrait is for phones and social platforms, landscape for anything that will be watched on a laptop. It is worth generating both if the reel is going to two audiences.
Focus. Attacking, defensive, or everything. This is the control most people ignore and it is the one that changes the reel most. A defensive reel for a back row and an attacking reel for a winger are different products, and sending the wrong one is a wasted send.
Generation runs in the background
A reel moves through draft, then processing, then completed. You do not wait on the page for it. If a generation fails, the reel returns to a state where it can be run again rather than being stuck.
You can regenerate as often as you like. Since the underlying events do not change, regenerating is mostly useful when you want a different length, framing or focus, or when new matches have been analysed since you last built one.
The Rugby CV is a separate thing
The CV is a shareable page about a player rather than a video. It carries a link you can send to anyone, so it does not require the recipient to have an account or to be part of your club.
It holds a selection of the player’s statistics, their teams and experience, references, and links to highlight videos. Each of those has a cap, deliberately: a small number of statistics, up to ten teams, up to ten references and up to ten highlight links. The limits exist because the failure mode of a player CV is including everything, and a page with thirty statistics on it communicates less than one with a handful.
The statistics can be generated for you from the player’s recorded events as a starting point, then changed. Most players should change them. The default is a reasonable general set, and a specific position or a specific ambition wants a different selection.
The part people get wrong
The commonest mistake is generating one reel, at the maximum length, with the focus left on everything, and sending that to every recipient.
The tools are built to produce several different short reels from the same underlying events, which is a genuinely different thing from one long one. A three-minute attacking reel in portrait for a social post, and a separate defensive reel in landscape for a coach who asked about your work rate, will both do their jobs. One ten-minute reel of everything does neither.
What it needs from you
Reels and CVs are only as good as the analysis behind them, and that means two things have to be right before any of it works. Players have to be linked to their jersey numbers for the matches they played in, and those matches have to have been analysed.
If a player looks quiet in the data and you know they were not, the jersey link is nearly always the reason. It is worth checking before the season starts rather than in March when somebody asks for a reel at short notice.
Hero photo: Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade (DFAT) / Sarah Friend, CC BY 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
