Amazon, Seahawks merge football, technology at Hermiston High School

Amazon, Seahawks merge football, technology at Hermiston High School

Published 8:00 pm Tuesday, October 13, 2026

HERMISTON — Technology and football came together Saturday, Oct. 10, at Hermiston High School as dozens of students learned how analytics can enhance athletic performance.

Amazon and the Seattle Seahawks hosted Tech Touchdown with former Seahawk Sidney Rice among those leading drills on Kennison Field. The event is a community and educational initiative that merges football, athletics and STEM education.

The Tech Touchdown was the first one in Eastern Oregon.

“This is super special to me,” Rice said. “I love technology and this is a cool opportunity to teach kids and help them to understand how analytics can help with athletics.”

Rice played seven seasons in the NFL, earning a Pro Bowl selection in 2009 and winning Super Bowl XLVIII with the Seahawks.

Outdoor drills, indoor analytics

The day began with more than 60 students in grades six through eight rotating between seven stations of football drills that Rice, USA Football coach Terry Summerfield and Hermiston High School coaches and players led.

The rotations covered a range of fundamentals from footwork to agility to position-specific skills — giving participants direct, hands-on coaching at every station.

Students then moved indoors for a series of STEM challenges focused on data-led decision-making in sports. Students were able to explore how performance is captured and measured, how patterns in past plays can inform predictions, how artificial intelligence and machine learning support roster decisions and how engineering, robotics and cloud computing come together to help build teams.

Jordan Richards of Amazon talked about how statistics and data can benefit athletes’ performances.

Using tech to improve performance

“As a sports fan, I love stats,” Richards said. “We use analytics in everything we do. In football, we use it to monitor movement to help prevent injuries. We work with the Seahawks to analyze data and optimize their performance.”

Jake Bacon, assistant superintendent with the Hermiston School District, gave a shout out to the HHS coaching staff and players who helped out with the event.

“To get our coaching staff and kids to come out here on a Saturday after a Friday night game is awesome,” he said.

Bacon said Tech Touchdown is a “perfect example of what’s possible when schools, industry leaders like Amazon Web Services, and organizations like the Seattle Seahawks come together.” He said the majority of students were from Umatilla and Morrow counties as well as a few from Portland.

“This benefits the whole region,” Bacon said. “Any time there’s an opportunity to bring something like this to the community, the district takes advantage.”