Last week, I discussed some of the common traits of the high school state champions I’ve worked with.  This week, I’m going to illustrate the speed improvement your high school athlete can make if put on the proper speed program.

People might think that you are naturally going to get faster from freshman year to your senior year right?  You get older, more mature, stronger.  At the very least, you should naturally just get faster.

Not necessarily.

What I’m going to share with you will show some athletes improving as they go through high school.  And some athletes actually getting worse.

As I mentioned last week, the focus of these next few blog posts will be the program I put my daughter, Anna Kessler, on during her high school athletic career.  To illustrate my point about how productive this speed program was, I’m going to share some charts I created.

These charts are athletes that competed against Anna all four years of high school in the 60M dash for indoor and the 100M dash in outdoor. The two events that truly define what your top end speed could be.

I’m also not going to give the competitors’ real names.  I’m just going to call them by letters.  This way you get a sense of how other high level sprinters are also improving.  It gives you something to compare and possibly use for your own athletes who might be roughly the same speed.

As you look at this chart, you can see Anna had the greatest improvement among all the athletes from Freshman year (2018) to Senior year (2021).  That improvement was good enough to get her in a top 5 time.

Let’s take a deeper look into this chart and why it might be of interest to you with your athlete:

  • First off, all of these athletes were from the Class of 2021 and all had recorded times all 4 years in the 60M dash.  That way I could see the progression.  This chart is just focusing on the overall improvement from Freshman to Senior year.  
  • If they were slower than Anna in 2018, the only way I would add them to the chart would be if they ran faster than her in a subsequent year.  No one did that in the 60M, but in the 100M (which I will share later) there were.
  • Athletes A and B were special athletes.  They came in fast and made noise right away.  Most track coaches don’t get to have those athletes.  Most track coaches have athletes around Anna’s time and if you are lucky maybe around Athlete C or G.
  • That being said, the goal of the track coach if you feel you have some talent is to develop your sprinters so that they will be in the conversation with Athlete A and B at a state meet.
  • Anna’s improvement over 4 years was .65 seconds.  In a 60M!!  That is pretty nice.  Athlete C was next at .57 then you have to go to Athlete D at .35 seconds.  

You can look at some of the athletes and see for yourself what kind of times they could have made if their improvement had been closer to Anna’s.  I think Anna’s would have been a little more if she hadn’t been quarantined due to a Covid exposure for 10 days right in the middle of indoor season.

Just take a look at some of your athlete’s times in the 60M.  If you have someone who in Year 1 is running a 8.3 or 8.2, look at where an improvement of .65 will take you.  Possibly in the discussion for making the Indoor State Meet.

For Anna’s senior year in indoor, she got 4th in the state in the 60M, part of the 4x400M team that got state runner-up, and part of the 4x200M team that was the STATE CHAMPION!  

I’d say the improvements were worth it and we haven’t even discussed outdoor yet.  We will do that next week and when I show you the 100M chart, you might be even more impressed.