Mark Hoover has been in the coaching world since the late 1990s. He started as a history teacher who lifted the most weight on the football staff and ended up running the weight room. A chance opportunity to learn from Wake Forest University football strength coach Ethan Reeve changed everything.

"I walked in thinking I was a really good strength coach and I walked out with an unbelievably disappointed view of what I actually knew," Hoover said.

That moment set him on a path toward becoming the kind of performance coach most high school programs never get. Today, he brings that expertise to St. James High School in the Myrtle Beach area of South Carolina, and PlayerData GPS tracking is central to how he is building something new.

Replacing the Old Model

When Hoover arrived at St. James in March of this year, he found what exists in many programs who lack a qualified strength and conditioning professional: a training philosophy built around the barbell.

"Many coaches have the barbell at the center of their wheel and everything else comes off of it," Hoover said. "The barbell is a big part of strength and conditioning, but you need to put performance at the center of that wheel and build a plan based on that.” 

When Hoover assessed the roster he found athletes who were strong but needing to be able to access that strength quicker. He focused on building horizontal force and explosiveness that high school football actually demands.

"I bench almost double what these players can bench and I'm 55 years old," he told his players. "But at the snap of the ball, you'd probably run me over. Because you'd be out of your stance and into me before I could get my hand off the ground."

He replaced the old approach with a performance-first model, one where position groups train differently, where plyometrics and sprint work sit alongside barbell movements, and where the question driving every decision isn’t just how much weight can we lift but what does this position actually need to do faster and more explosively.

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GPS Tracking as the Foundation

Hoover's philosophy around GPS tracking data is distinct. He uses it to prepare athletes for the next hardest thing they will face in the season.

"My philosophy on GPS isn't to just prepare them for games," Hoover said. "It's to prepare them for what the next hardest thing they have to go through in the season is."

In year one at a new program, that means collecting data and identifying the obvious actionable gaps. PlayerData's GPS system made that process immediate. The first game of the 2026 season made the stakes clear. Weather limited outdoor practice time significantly in the weeks leading up to the opener. During that first game, players cramped in the second half. When Hoover checked the GPS data, the reason was undeniable.

"They covered as much high-speed distance and sprint speed in the first half as they had the whole previous week including the scrimmage," he said.

That GPS data is now shaping everything. Hoover works backward from game demands calculating the high-speed distance, sprint totals, acceleration and deceleration counts a game requires, then reduces load by ten percent each week going back through the preseason calendar. The goal is to arrive at the hardest moment of the season with athletes who have been systematically built toward it rather than thrown into it.

He also tracks day-to-day progression by comparing Monday to Monday, Tuesday to Tuesday, Wednesday to Wednesday. This allows him to identify load spikes before they become injuries.

The results are already visible. One of Hoover’s primary goals is to make his athletic trainer have a “boring” season. So far, that’s been the case.

Small-Sided Games and GPS-Verified Conditioning

One of Hoover's most direct applications of GPS tracking data is in conditioning methodology. He is a committed advocate for small-sided games over traditional high school football conditioning drills like 110s and 40s, not on principle, but because the GPS data proves why.

"The traditional conditioning drills still serve a purpose for a lot of programs, primarily they help to show you who’s tough," Hoover said. "But my goal is to prepare them for the sport, and it’s different when you add an element of competition and decision making to the conditioning."

Small-sided games allow Hoover to manipulate field dimensions and player counts to target exactly what the GPS data shows the players need. If athletes lack high-speed decelerations, open the field, reduce the number of players and make it a wide-open change-of-direction game. If accelerations and decelerations are the gap, condense the space and let players chase each other in a game of tag.

The psychological dimension matters too. Hoover referenced a study that shows that brain activity is measurably different when athletes react to a human opponent versus a cone. Competition activates responses that repetitive conditioning drills never can.

"I love having them chase each other," Hoover said. "It sounds silly, but it works. One of my players  just set a personal record on his speed and he was laughing while doing it because they’re playing a game.” 

None of this would be possible to manage or validate without GPS tracking. PlayerData's system tells Hoover whether the small-sided game delivered what he intended, whether players hit the metrics their position demands, and whether the week's cumulative load is tracking toward the target or drifting toward injury risk.

For high school football programs evaluating GPS trackers, Hoover's message is direct.

"A lot of people are using it just to get miles per hour," Hoover said. "Once you get your hands on it, you will realize there is so much more to it. GPS is an elite performance preparation tool."

At St. James, it is already proving exactly that.



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