An NAIA playing career.
A junior college post to initiate a coaching career.
Major “breaks” for some of college football’s most notorious meat-grinder coaches upon finally arriving at the Football Bowls Subdivision.
Amongst the legion of thankless coaching hours, Jon Shalala carries experience beyond his near-decade tenure in the unrelenting field.
Now, however, Shalala and his company – ANSRS – are seeking to alleviate some of that coaching tedium.
Billing itself as the “fastest, most accurate data and video management system in football,” ANSRS is the ever-growing software that Shalala believes is going to streamline game-planning and change the way coaches scheme for opponents – both in the days leading into a contest and, perhaps, during the game itself.
Today, the fledgling company with Shalala as its founder and chief product officer is increasingly populating the football world at all levels.
Brainchild of Shalala from his tinkering with the concept during off-the-field staffing roles at Tennessee under Butch Jones and Bob Shoop, then Jeremy Pruitt, as well as Mississippi State with the late Mike Leach and Shoop, and then again as a full-time defensive assistant on a track to become defensive coordinator for Jones at Arkansas State, ANSRS is officially partnering with the United Football League.
“Here in the UFL, we’ve got a smaller staff, definitely similar to smaller colleges, with eight guys on the entire coaching staff and breakdowns during the season, the capability from ANSRS is going to help us with regards to scouting reports,” says Jordan Pavlisin, running backs coach for the UFL’s Michigan Panthers and former member of the United States Marine Corps. “It’s going to help our ability to self-scout, opponents’ scouts, more efficient processes to finding the data we need to find and free up time to focus on the opponent to do the actual coaching we need to do.
“ANSRS basically make all that easy to make it super friendly for coaches like myself. I’m confident it’s going to free up hours every week from grinding, crunching numbers and reports that our whole staff is going to appreciate. We’re not going to get the full functional ability of what it can do in-game right now but just for charting and keeping up with in-game reports, it’s going to provide us data to help us hopefully get an edge on opponents.”
Adds the UFL’s Daryl Johnston, the league’s executive vice president for operations and former star of the NFL’s Dallas Cowboys, “The United Football League is excited to have the opportunity to add ANSRS to our coaching staffs’ arsenal of preparation. We do not have the luxury of large staffs in the UFL, and our coaches grind every day to prepare their players to be their best on game day. The addition of ANSRS will be a huge asset in multiple areas of their game prep, but the most important thing it creates for our coaches is time. Less time preparing and more time with family.”
Still a grinder – personally driving to help the UFL onboard the program this week – Shalala seeks the opportunity to help make lives a bit more manageable for his former coaching brethren.
“I started tracking and having my own shortcuts doing things on Excel, building reports, finding ways to make my job more efficient and faster because when I was working for Bob Shoop, things were super dynamic in that staff room and I always wanted to be the guy that had the answer, no pun intended,” says Shalala, a former quarterback at Grand View University whose big break into coaching was an offensive line gig at desolate junior college outpost Arizona Western. “I wanted to be the guy to answer those things in a dynamic, quick fashion and I needed to build some mechanisms to do that in a fast manner.”
Working with Leach and Shoop at State during the COVID-19 pandemic is when Shalala remembers really accelerating the program’s development.
“When COVID happened, Coach Leach brought us in and told us, ‘Hey, look, we’re going to go our separate ways and I’m going to Key West. If there’s anything you ever wanted to do and never had the time, now is the time,’” Shalala recalls. “I was 24 years old sitting in that staff room thinking, ‘I know exactly what I’m going to do.’
“I went home to Houston, built everything I could, every mock-up, the whole foundation of what ANSRS is, I built during COVID. When we got to return, I showed it to Zach Arnett, our defensive coordinator and now defensive coordinator at UNLV, and he was really impressed. That’s when I said, ‘I have to make this into a product.’”
Tryouts around a football program are commonplace for walk-ons; Shalala still has his key engineer – James Watters – from development tryouts he remembers coordinating through State’s entrepreneurial center on campus. The software fully integrates with the Catapult football software system, an element Shalala stresses in his product being "user-friendly."
Now, “we have more than 100 customers, including the UFL,” he says, “and with all these schools jumping in the boat, it’s remarkable to look back on at this point.”
More schools are finalizing their deals to use the ANSRS software in the coming weeks as state universities work through their procurement obligations; multiple members from the 2024 College Football Playoff field are either already signing up or exploring the ANSRS platform.
Nearly one-fourth of SEC teams are considering adding the software, he says. If a team wants a demo, Shalala stays ready to present online or in person.
“I want to be able to give them a tool to just maybe have a better chance to make a better decision that can help to win a game,” he says. “Help to get a stop on third down, generate a couple more plays, help in the red zone.
“Whatever it is, those things start on Sunday night, late at night, going over reports and video as a staff.”
