Seattle Seahawks fine-tune player performance with Microsoft

Growing up in Ohio, I rooted for the Cleveland sports teams. Having spent a good part of my career in the Pacific Northwest though, I now have great admiration and have become one of the “12’s” – fans of the Seattle Seahawks.

The energy and excitement this team has built over the years is infectious and its driven by a team that is constantly raising the bar. “Do it better than it’s ever been done before” is a quote firmly embedded into the heart and soul of the organization. The mantra comes directly from General Manager John Schneider and one of only three football coaches who have ever won both a Super Bowl and college football national championship, Pete Carroll. 

The Schneider-Carroll era in Seattle has brought with it championships, Hall of Famers and, perhaps most importantly, a team philosophy rooted in grit, determination and technology. Yes, technology.

For the past three years, the Seahawks have been working with Microsoft to experiment with ways in which technology could be used to fine-tune player performance and give them an edge over the competition. The culmination of these experiments has turned into a full-blown sports science lab that is pioneering new ways to reduce risk for injury, get the most out of their players and prolong their health.

Microsoft’s Sports Performance Platform

Specifically, the Seahawks have implemented Microsoft’s Sports Performance Platform - a data-driven predictive analytics platform unlike anything in the industry that harnesses the power of Microsoft’s cloud with state-of-the-art machine learning technologies and artificial intelligence capabilities to predict outcomes. Insights generated by the platform are used by Seahawks coaches, players and staff to make more intelligent decisions around training and recovery so that players are at their peak performance on game day and generally healthier throughout the season. 

“Being able to centralize all of the data points that our players allow us to collect has given us a dependable and versatile platform to optimally inform the athlete how each is responding to the physical and mental demands of professional football,” said Seahawks Director of Health and Player Performance Sam Ramsden. “Then, in quick fashion, we are able to empower the coaches with rich and meaningful insights into their players to customize daily practice, training and conditioning. Microsoft technology is a tremendous help in that process.”

Prevention vs. reaction

The Seahawks use subjective survey data, athlete system data, sensor telemetry and other sources of information to study a player’s physiological patterns and state, nutrition, soreness, pain and more. Through the Sports Performance Platform, they can:

• Manage and develop predictive models for athlete health and wellness, athlete performance and injury prediction.
• Create rich and insightful reports that help decision-making around training and athlete strength and conditioning.
• Mitigate athlete injuries using a variety of training and athlete system data.
• Help reduce key injuries and keep key players in the game.

The intelligence generated is used by coaches, players and staff to make faster, more data-driven decisions in preparation for game day. The partnership with Microsoft has put them on the cutting edge of sports science and is revolutionizing the game as we know it today. Which is critically important in a game sometimes decided by inches or the nose of a football across the goal line.

Changing the game

Microsoft’s Sports Performance Platform builds on a long history of working with sporting organizations like NASCAR and the PGA TOUR. The platform includes a broad array of Microsoft Azure services and business intelligence capabilities such as Power BI; it also integrates with Microsoft’s other productivity offerings such as Office 365. The platform can be used across a variety of user experiences (such as Microsoft Surface apps) to collect and display relevant athlete data, integrating data from disparate data sources into a central, cloud-based data lake, and connecting this data to Power BI, a rich reporting platform unto itself, and a broader set of machine learning services — with which sports scientists can rapidly iterate and build predictive learning models for any number of scenarios. Staff can then display detailed reports and dashboards across Microsoft Surface devices (armed with facial recognition software) or larger Surface Hubs. The Sports Performance Platform brings together the power of software, services and devices for a full 360-degree experience.

Teams such as the Seattle Reign FC, Real Sociedad, Sport Lisboa e Benfica and Cricket Australia are already using Microsoft’s Sports Performance Platform predictive outcome modeling and analytics capabilities to track and improve player performance. Microsoft’s goal is to make those technologies accessible to all levels of sport — professional, academy, high school, individual athletes and coaches.

Sports organizations interested in learning more about Microsoft’s Sports Performance Platform can sign up to receive our regular communications here. And you can read more about the work Microsoft is doing with the Seahawks at https://trnsfrm.ms/hawks.

In the meantime, here's to a strong finish to the season - Go Hawks!