Tennessee answering questions this fall with ANSRS

Tennessee is using new technology that will help the staff work faster and more efficiently. It not only will help the main staff but also helps the young and up and coming coaches. It was designed by former Vol graduate assistant Jon Shalala. He has been back in town helping install ANSRS this spring and summer as the Vols look for every advantage to work smarter and faster this fall. Being back in the defensive staff room where he started to build the program has been not only surreal but special. 

“It’s special,” Shalala said. “You’re a GA and you graduate from the University of Tennessee with your masters degree and kind of in that process, I’m an analytical guy anyway so with the computer science background, I’m looking at it and I’m doing my job and I’m like there’s gotta be a better way. 

“To be able to start building it in the defensive staff room late at night to early in the morning and kind of just starting to do it just to help automate my job. It wasn’t really that I was going to create it into a company because I really wanted to coach. It was just a way how can I be more efficient to be the best at my job that I can be. I always wanted to be the guy that if somebody had a question they’re like just go ask Shalala. He’ll either have it or he will go figure it out pretty quick. Starting it there and then really moving on and growing it but coming back and just spending time with the GA’s especially the defensive guys, like those guys obviously are doing the job that I did at this point about seven years ago and so it is cool to try to help those guys out as much as I can. And I’m doing it in that building so just super happy and have a lot of pride in that. It’s personal to try to help those guys out.”

Shalala wanted Tennessee to benefit from this technology since it was created in the building. He got in touch with Josh Heupel and his staff and they were quick to jump into the opportunity to get quicker answers. 

“Just an opportunity for us as a staff to have the best tools and to be able to ultimately be more efficient and be better as a staff which makes make your players better,” Heupel said. “So as a program you’re always looking for ways to continue to improve, and this gives us a way in our preparation to continue to grow and get better.”

In his time as a coach in roles as a Graduate Assistant and Analyst in the SEC at Tennessee and Mississippi State, and later as one of the youngest position coaches in college football at Arkansas State, Shalala experienced firsthand the hectic and time consuming toll of data breakdown, report creation, and game planning that was required in order to win during a college football season. 

He was driven by an innovative spirt and a deep passion for helping coaches. Thus he set out to challenge the status quo by developing a product built to serve coaches at every level. ANSRS is installed and engrained in over 30 major college programs with multiple NFL teams and countless high schools involved in using this technology.

“First and foremost I started to do it to help coaches and what I mean help coaches is empowering the younger guys in the building to not just be really good with computers, but to be able to provide the information to their coordinators, to the position coaches, faster and more accurate,” Shalala said.

“To really allow those guys to allow a system to do a lot of their jobs so that they can focus on being a better football coach because really what I learned when I was a young GA, young QC is I’d sit in the room, I’d listen to what they were saying, but I was so busy building reports and finding tendencies by breaking down tape that I never truly was able to take a step back and learn how to coach until I really progressed and ended up at Arkansas State and had to coach. It was something that I realized that I needed to build a tool that could automate a lot of the processes that we can leverage computers and and just different data. Automation tools to be able to allow those guys just to cut their teeth and actually be able to coach guys rather than just punching on a computer.”

For the advanced, trying to understand the software may be a bit difficult but he says it’s the football version of doing your taxes.

“When I try to explain what ANSRS is to people, it’s a tool for football coaches to use a data management system that is very similar to how an accountant would use a QuickBooks to be able to build reports within the system, filter, sort and look at trends, look at tendencies and then ultimately be able to watch the video behind those stats,” Shalala said. “A system like this probably exists a bunch of times over in other worlds. It just didn’t exist in football and so I was able to kind of take the things that were necessary that the coaches needed to do whether that was data breakdown or building reports or finding your tendencies automating a system enough for those coaches to use.”

And tight ends coach Alec Abeln has seen it firsthand since it was installed.

“I think it streamlines your breakdown process and the ability to auto fill a lot of columns that would to have to be manually inputted whether by a GA, an analyst or a position coach the way that they’ve got it set up where you know one column can fill out 20 columns for you is really helpful,” Abeln said. “The report building that they’ve created really is just an improvement on a lot of the stuff that already exists that really makes it more user-friendly and just saves you time and makes it easier to find outliers.”

Shalala made the move to Rocky Top as a 22 year old working at Arizona Western community college. He was the one that took the infamous Johnathan Kongbo picture where then defensive coordinator Bob Shoop was eating ice cream. It was being under Shoop and then eventually Jeremy Pruitt that pushed him to create ANSRS.

“I was put in front of and I was given the opportunity to be Bob Shoop’s GA,” Shalala said. “One thing about Bob Shoop is he is extremely analytical, extremely numbers based. He’s always looking at different ways to find tendencies and find what the opponents are doing. I think being around a guy like Bob Shoop or a guy like Jeremy Pruitt, who are so demanding from a defensive standpoint. Really looking at the opponent from all different angles, I was never able to provide information to them fast enough. 

“He starts asking questions like do they just do this in 2×2 or what about 3×1? What if the tight end and back are on the same side? Is it any different than when they are apart from one another? Those types of information that really took you a while to be able to make those reports and come up with that information to be able to answer those questions, you weren’t able to do it at the click that you needed to when you only really had three days to prep for an opponent. So just just being around those guys and how demanding they were and how detailed they were really, you needed some type of system that could aid you or else there wasn’t enough time in the day.” 

Shalala sees more and more teams interested all the time. He left Tennessee’s facility earlier this month and headed to Miami to work with the Miami Dolphins. Other top end schools like Texas are also using his program.

“I think the biggest thing about the software is you can really tell that that it was developed by a person that was in the room,” Shalala said. “You start using it and there’s a lot of nuance and detail that coaches are looking for. It’s not just your typical analytic software right. It’s more of a game planning tool than it is analytics. It’s more of a coaches workshop and Quickbooks and what I tell people is it’s really the hammer and the nails. It’s not the house and what I mean by that is there’s a lot of software products that just try to offer you the thing versus what I did. I offered you a really good hammer. Here is a really good nail. I’m going to teach you how to build this, but it’s really your platform to go customize to go build the things that you need to do so that you can get the answers you need and just be more efficient. So coaches really do appreciate it because it’s really the first of its kind. It’s more coaches scheme driven. It’s a tools built for coaches.”