By day, high school assistant coach. By night, Twitter’s source for basketball Xs and Os.

Late in Belmont’s NCAA tournament loss to Maryland, longtime coach Rick Byrd called on one of his favorite plays, where a guard picks up his dribble and appears to panic – only to rifle a back-door pass to a player breaking from the wing. This time, he added a wrinkle. The player coming from the wing was a decoy, and the back-door pass was toward the middle of the lane.

It didn’t work – the pass was just off target – and Belmont lost, but not before a Cary Academy assistant boys basketball coach’s Twitter mentions exploded while he was watching back in the Triangle. The 29,000 basketball-crazed followers of the @HalfCourtHoops account recognized Belmont’s “panic” play immediately, thanks to the tireless film study of Gibson Pyper. (Liberty tried to run it against Mississippi State, too.)

What started as a way to learn more about basketball became a full-time job for Pyper, who is best known for posting free college and NBA clips on Twitter and a YouTube channel with 19,000 subscribers but has a members-only website where he posts video breakdowns of teams’ entire playbooks. For $20 a month, coaches at all levels – high school, college, pro, international – get access to his library of 30 full playbooks and more than 1,000 individual plays. The site, thebasketballplaybook.com, is like Netflix for basketball Xs and Os, and enough coaches want access to pay his bills.

“Having somebody at the NBA level be a member on my website is something really cool to me,” said Pyper, 30, who played high-school basketball at Leesville Road. “It makes me feel like I’m doing something right.”

But it’s not easy. It’s a tireless, one-man job.

Pyper needed nine hours to put together the full video playbook of Virginia’s offense and defense ahead of the Final Four – and that’s an easy one, with Virginia running only two basic offensive schemes over and over again. (The pack-line defense is a little more intricate.)

His home office is set up with a 32-inch TV, an iMac outfitted with a video-capture device and editing software and a laptop for recording online feeds, all of which allows him to post plays almost immediately after they happen. Meanwhile, he’s constantly cutting clips and cataloging them for his subscribers.

During the first weekend of the NCAA tournament, he brought in an extra television and had four games playing at once, cutting clips and posting them to Twitter at his followers’ requests, more than 100 over the course of the weekend. His favorite new wrinkle: Not Belmont’s twist on its “panic” set, but the back-door play N.C. Central ran for an easy basket against North Dakota State.

The video analysis started when Pyper became an assistant coach at his alma mater, Leesville Road. He wanted to learn more about Xs and Os and started cutting up film in 2011, beginning with Brad Stevens’ sets at Butler. As his library grew and he was able to put some of it into practice, first at Leesville Road and then at Cary Academy, so did his confidence.

“Now I can say, ‘We tried Davidson’s offense, here are the drills we ran, why it worked, why it didn’t work,’” Pyper said.

Now, doors are opening. In addition to Raleigh, Pyper also grew up in Ohio, a big Ohio State fan. When he noticed Buckeyes coach Chris Holtmann followed him on Twitter, he messaged him while on a trip back there. Holtmann let Pyper come by and watch practice. Butler is among the NBA and college staffs that subscribe to his website, the school that really got it all started.

All of which leads to the joke everyone makes: Cary Academy’s playbook must be 5 inches thick. A year ago, when the Chargers had Rice-bound star Trey Murphy, they went 17-6 while running a complicated offense. This season, Cary Academy only won two games in a rebuilding year.

“For me, all of this information, 98 percent of it might be useless,” Pyper said. “I might never put any of this in a game, but I use it for my own knowledge. If we’re down two with 35 seconds left and we’ve been running this play over and over again and the other team knows it’s coming, I might remember a counter Purdue ran against Auburn, call a timeout and put that in. That’s why I do it.”

This story was originally published April 2, 2019 at 5:41 PM.