Sports data provider Stats Perform has handed senior positions to brothers Steve and Peter Hirdt, two of the leading names in US sports broadcast research and content.
Steve Hirdt will take over as senior director of operations and research at Stats Perform, while Peter will serve as senior director of content and broadcast service. Both will join the provider from the Elias Sports Bureau.
An expert on sports statistics, Steve Hirdt has spent over 35 years as director of information on NFL-focused television program Monday Night Football, on both ABC and ESPN. He also served as executive vice president at the Elias Sports Bureau for over 20 years .
Peter Hirdt spent more than four decades at the Elias Sports Bureau, where he was a consultant for ABC Monday Night Baseball and Monday Night Football, as well as CBS Sports’ MLB coverage. He also conceived, designed and managed the Graphics Library, a service now used across MLB, NBA, and NHL telecasts.
“If you talk to anyone across the sports broadcast industry, Steve and Peter’s names come up as two of the most influential minds for modern sports statistics and media coverage,” Stats Perform chief executive Carl Mergele said.
“Over the past four decades, they instilled standards and practices that led the sports broadcast industry to embrace the use of data to enhance storytelling. Now they join Stats Perform at a pivotal moment as we use industry-leading AI and our unmatched historical database to unlock a new set of sports insights.”
Steve Hirdt said he looked forward to helping the supplier create a new standard for sports broadcasting.
“With recent advancements in AI, Stats Perform is at the forefront of ushering in new capabilities for data and statistics in sports,” he said.
Peter Hirdt added: “We are excited for the opportunity to bring our decades of experience in statistics and sports media to a company with the infrastructure and technology to fully support our initiatives.”
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