Flower Mound Marcus head coach Mike Alexander is tired of his players lying to him in the halftime locker room.

Whether it’s a defensive tackle trying to claim he was double-teamed, or a linebacker insisting he fitted to the A gap, kids won’t be able to pull the wool over his eyes anymore. This season, he'll put an iPad in front of his player and show him the film.

In May, the UIL allowed in-game technology use in the press box and locker rooms for the 2024 football season, creating an open market in Texas high school football for camera and software products promising a competitive edge. Marcus chose SkyCoach, an instant replay system which syncs up to all the cameras teams video the game on a Friday night, then dumps the feed directly to coaches in the pressbox with iPads. In between series, coaches can select certain plays and view them from all different angles, even pausing it or putting the feed in slow motion.

SkyCoach is far from the only product debuting at Texas high schools. Allen and Lockhart are using a data system to automate the video breakdown process called ANSRS.

Developed by Jon Shalala, a former SEC defensive quality control assistant tired of charting drives by hand, ANSRS learns a team's terminology using the 500 formations and personnel packages it comes preloaded. Then, a coach can plug the back set, formation and play call into the algorithm. From there, ANSRS runs dozens of micro reports, such as where the tight end is lined up, if the running back is toward the field or boundary, and the run/pass percentage. This information allows for instantaneous tendency reports (this team ran the ball 70% of the time on 2nd and short, and our team lined up in trips formation 90% of the time on 3rd and long) and Hit Charts.

“All the ways that everybody’s using that technology on Sunday afternoons, watching NFL games, we’re about to get to do the same thing,” Alexander said.

But schools aren't saving technology usage to Friday night. Lockhart head coach Todd Moebes refers to ANSRS as a 365-day tool. Take a postseason self-scout, for example, where an offensive coordinator charts every play from the year, searching for a tendency they’ve set to break it ahead of the next season.

“The old school way was writing all that stuff down on pen and paper. That takes a month, sometimes six weeks, to be able to do,” Moebes said. “With ANSRS, since it’s all inputted into the software, you’re able to get that 10-to-16 game self-scout in a matter of minutes.”

Allen head coach Lee Wiginton believes ANSRS will allow his coaching staff to win the weekend during the season. Last year, his coaches would take the film they traded with an opponent, plug the data into HUDL and then sort through all the reports they wished to run. Then and only then could they actually start making sense of an opponent and begin game planning. That meant tinkering with it throughout the week, sometimes making game plan adjustments as late as Wednesday.

With ANSRS, all that automated data can be copied and pasted directly into HUDL.

“What our hope is, is that this process is streamlined a lot more to where we jump about two days ahead,” Wiginton said. “We feel that we have the potential to go into Monday with a full understanding of our opponent because we got to the answers of the breakdown so much quicker, which gave us more time to dissect it and study it.”

All these benefits were enough for Wiginton to buy the product in January, becoming the service's first high school customer and joining the NFL's Washington Commanders and college football's Texas Tech. But with the UIL’s ruling, schools like Lockhart and Allen can have it available for the coaches in the pressbox. No more drawing 22 Xs and Os on paper of all the other team’s different formations. The coaches can present the ANSRS analysis and immediately find the handful of plays the team needs to watch on tape.

“Our coaches in the pressbox, when it’s time to come down at halftime, they’re able to just hit a button to load everything on that device,” Moebes said.“They’re not up there trying to find the 17th play that they ran on the third series at the end of the first quarter so that the head coach can look at it during halftime.”

Schools like Allen, Lockhart and Marucs know there will be kinks to work out during the first few weeks of the season, but such is the burden of being on the front lines of what football could be. They'll work with companies such as ANSRS and SkyCoach to provide feedback so the products can continually improve, making the sport work smarter and not harder as it does.