SAN ANTONIO – During any given football game, coaches on the field and in the coaches’ booth work to call plays, react to changes, as well as quickly and effectively communicate to their players in order to try and win the game.
One former coach developed a system to revolutionize that process called ANSRS (pronounced like answers).
“In the state of Texas, you have the best high school football coaches in the world. There’s no doubt about that,” said Jon Shalala, ANSRS founder and Sugar Land, Texas native. “A tool like this allows them to be able to really strategize more advanced to get ready for things that they saw in the first half to prepare for the second half.”
Steele High School used the system during its 2025 season to reach the regional semifinals.
Trailing by one score to Johnson at halftime, Steele’s coaches in the press box fed real-time data to the sideline staff, getting everyone on the same page quickly for the second half.
“The answers are pretty immediate,” said defensive coordinator Mike Gomez. “Basically, anything that I want to know during the game, I just call upstairs and say, ‘Hey, what’s happening here in this instant?’ And tendencies come up pretty quick.”
The fluid process stands in sharp contrast to what Shalala experienced years earlier as a staff member at Tennessee.
“It was 14-7 Tennessee versus Georgia,” Shalala recalled. “We didn’t have the video like (ANSRS). We were feeding the transparencies in the overhead—like a kindergarten, elementary school overhead projector.“
”Coach is going over play by play,“ Shalala continued. ”He gets frustrated, picks up the projector, spikes it on the ground, it shatters everywhere.”
“It was really at that moment in time where I felt like there needed to be a uniform system that every coach uses to review the data,” Shalala said, “to review the video, to make cut ups, to be able to make adjustments during the football game.”
After Tennessee, Shalala joined the late Mike Leach’s staff at Mississippi State.
It was during the COVID-19 pandemic that Leach told Shalala to use the downtime to his advantage — and he did, building ANSRS into a tool that is now improving life for coaches and leveling up the game of football.
ANSRS has been rolled out to high schools, colleges and NFL teams across the country for a year now.
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