Kiwi sports scientist an unsung NFL star
NFL superstar Russell Wilson had a big week. He’s sore, as all American footballers are, but he just took seven sacks in a big loss to the Los Angeles Rams. It was rough.
Seattle Seahawks coach Pete Carroll turns to his applied sports scientist, Dean Riddle, as the players run out for practice and asks how many reps Wilson can train for. They don’t want their star man suffering an injury.
‘‘Between 15 and 17,’’ Riddle replies in his thick, Invercargill accent, complete with rolling Rs and all.
Carroll glances at his tablet, then nods in approval. It’s as he thought, but sometimes he likes to get confirmation from the source.
This is the world Riddle, a former farm boy who attended Southland Boys’ High School, now lives in – the exciting, highpressure environment of the National Football League.
Riddle’s path to the NFL started in Invercargill, where he worked at sports shops and briefly in the stock and station industry, before coaching league team He Tauaa.
When they played Mangere East during the national competition in 1987, the Mad Butcher himself noticed Riddle’s efforts, Sir Peter Leitch asking him to say hello if he ever moved to Auckland.
That happened a couple of years later, taking Riddle’s sporting journey to the next level.
Before he knew it, Riddle was in England working with the Sheffield Eagles and the Leeds Rhinos, before switching sports and working with the English cricket team.
It was there, in the mid-1990s, that Riddle took his sports science work up a notch, helping turn cricketers into actual athletes.
‘‘That’s when I first started getting really involved with data,’’ Riddle explains.
‘‘I worked with a software engineer and wrote a software package. It was on floppy disks, back in the day, and we sent these out, all the counties received a software package.
‘‘They had four disks discs to load into their computer and they’d put in their injury information and their fitness testing data and use it to write training programmes.
‘‘They’d then do a backup of their testing data and send it back to us. That was the first data management platform, back in the ’90s.’’
Fast-forward 20 years, and Riddle was in another country, another continent, working to create a similar data management platform with Microsoft.
This time Real Madrid were wanting to get into the sports science game, and Riddle was uniquely placed to help out.
Stints with Sheffield United and Leeds United in the English football league had given him the right experience, and the partnership would help him create a new system for his new employers, the Seattle Seahawks.
‘‘It was very obvious that the software we had was just not going to cut it,’’ Riddle said of his start with the Seahawks.
‘‘Microsoft was on our doorstep, and there was a reasonably fortuitous connection to Microsoft because, it’s not really what they do, but they’d done a deal with Real Madrid and they needed a data software platform.’’
The Seahawks are only a matter of miles from Microsoft’s headquarters in Seattle, and being the closest highperformance sports team, they thought they could get help building the software for Real Madrid.
‘‘The call came through to me, and he explained what he was trying to do, he’d love to get some insights into it,’’ Riddle says.
‘‘I basically helped them design what they needed, which was amazing, because it was almost exactly what I’d designed in the mid-1990s, except it was like driving a Ferrari while doing it. Their engineers are amazing.’’
What had started with a bunch of floppy disks discs in the 90s was now being transformed using Microsoft’s super-computers, and used by one of the richest sporting organisations on the planet.
In return, Riddle and the Seahawks got Microsoft’s support in redesigning their own sports science department. The benefits were mutual.
Simply put, the Seahawks can now take five key data sets and combine them to accurately predict just how hard a player can train without doing any damage to their body.
They take into account GPS data, self-questionnaires, rate of perceived exertion and advanced muscle testing to monitor levels of fatigue.
They are also starting to look into experimental cognitive measurements.
Added to that is counting the number of reps someone makes in training, and advanced information in the gym like bar speed when lifting, to create a tool that is more advanced than almost anything in sport.
‘‘We essentially want to know as much as we possibly can about every player in the building,’’ Riddle says.
‘‘Once we know what your normal training process looks like, we should be able to then predict it and then talk to our position coaches and our head coach and go, this is the threshold for what he should do today.
‘‘We actually know what optimal preparation looks like. We know when you’ve done enough training, but not too much. Just the optimal amount.’’
Some players were quicker than others to understand and make the most out of the data they were being presented with.
One of the most engaged is wide receiver Doug Baldwin, who battled injuries when he first came into the NFL. Data helped him get his body right.
‘‘Sam [Ramsden, head of player health] and Dean, they can take the analytics and give us a plan on a week-to-week basis on how much load we’re doing and they tailor our practices so we’re at our optimal point athletically and mentally when we get to Sundays,’’ Baldwin told the Seahawks website.
Riddle said it was Seahawks head coach Carroll who wanted a sports science department, and they built it from the ground up after winning the Super Bowl in 2014.
While some coaches don’t fully understand the data, they all know how important it is, Riddle said.
‘‘Pete Carroll, he called my office this morning and wanted to know some timing numbers on a player returning from injury,’’ Riddle said.
‘‘He knew the numbers, but wanted to get some feedback from me on the difference between hand timing and digital timing.
‘‘Yes, Pete Carroll gets it. He wanted it. He and general manager John Schneider interviewed us all as we came through. Before we started here they had the makings of a sports science dept, but Sam Ramsden put the team together.
‘‘They wanted to do it better than it’s ever been done before and they said we’re not sure how you’re going to do it, but we’re going to back you, take your time with it.’’
For a long time the partnership between the Seahawks and Microsoft was kept secret, with the full extent of Riddle and the sport science team’s work known only by the team and tech company.
But Microsoft has now gone public with its Sports Performance Platform, offering it up for use by high schools and university teams around the world.
Cricket Australia is already using software to assess its players, and it would appear ready-made for rugby, or Riddle’s first sport, league.
What started with a Southlander entering code into a few floppy disks is now shaping athletes around the globe.