'What Does It Actually Take to Develop Speed in Team Sport?'
Ask that question and the answers usually come quickly.
Acceleration. Max velocity. Deceleration. Change of direction. Strength. Plyometrics. Sprint mechanics.
All important. None of them, on their own, is the answer.
The challenge is making sense of all of it in context. Which qualities matter most for this athlete? How do they interact? And where should you intervene?
You need to understand the principles and systems that underpin speed development. You need to be able to look at an athlete and identify the problem you're actually trying to solve. You need to translate that understanding into profiling, drills, progressions and programming that work within the constraints of a team environment.
And then you need to account for the athlete receiving that work.
Their training history. Injury history. Current readiness. Workload. Movement quality. What they've already done this week. What you're asking them to do next. What they can tolerate today.
These aren't separate subjects. They're different parts of the same coaching decision.
Yet we've traditionally learned them separately.
We learn biomechanics and sprint mechanics in one place. Programming and drills somewhere else. Health, rehabilitation and return to play somewhere else again. We collect knowledge from different coaches, courses and disciplines, then take it back into our own environment and try to connect the pieces.
We think that's the problem.
Because when an athlete is standing in front of you, you don't get to solve the speed problem first, the programming problem second and the health problem third.
You have to make one decision.
What does this athlete need, what should I do about it, and what can they appropriately tolerate right now?
That is the problem we set out to solve with the Team Speed Coach Certification.
We wanted to build something that treated speed development as the interconnected coaching problem it actually is.
So we brought together three distinct but connected perspectives.
ALTIS: how to think. The Complexity & Systems lens: understanding the systems, biomechanics and interrelationships that shape coordination and performance.
Les Spellman: how to apply it. The Practice and Performance lens: translating those ideas into drills, progressions and programming that work in real team environments.
Danny Foley: how to sustain it. The Health-Performance lens: working in the space between health and performance, and understanding how movement quality and therapy principles can sustain and extend performance.
One athlete. One coaching problem. Three perspectives that have to work together.
That is what makes Team Speed different to any other course or program available on the market today.
The Team Speed Coach Certification is the first of its kind: a fully comprehensive, multi-level certification in speed for team sport.
We’ve zoomed all the way out to understand how you develop a speed system, and all the way back down to the decisions you have to make with an athlete today.
And rather than simply tell you how comprehensive it is, we want to show you.
In this first in our series of preview articles, we're going to share an exclusive look inside the opening months of Level I: System Foundations.
“Team Speed gave me an actual system instead of just a pile of exercises.”
— Nico Tatusch, Team Speed Member - Cohort 1
Month 1: Before you choose the intervention, understand the problem
Level I begins with foundations, but perhaps not the foundations you would expect from a conventional speed course.
There is no rush to give you a library of drills.
The starting point is learning to understand the problem.
ALTIS: Beautiful Questions — The Heart of Coaching
Stu McMillan begins by examining the quality of the questions we ask.
Coaching now exists in an environment with an extraordinary amount of information. We have research, technology, data, video, testing and an almost endless supply of exercises and interventions available to us.
But more information does not necessarily produce better decisions.
If the question is poor, more information can simply help you become more confident in the wrong answer.
The opening ALTIS module therefore focuses on asking better questions, seeing what matters and making decisions under uncertainty.
Before asking what drill should I use?, there is a more important question:
What kind of problem am I actually looking at?
That distinction may sound obvious. In practice, however, it changes almost everything that follows.
Les Spellman: Acceleration — On Field
Les takes that question which Stu posed directly onto the field.
Acceleration is often discussed as though it were one quality with one technical model. In reality, the problem can change considerably across the first 5–20 meters.
An athlete struggling with projection and push during the opening steps presents a different problem from an athlete who accelerates effectively early but struggles as they transition toward higher velocity.
Seeing that difference affects what you coach.
Les’s opening module gives you a clear, usable acceleration model, teaches you to recognize key shapes and patterns in the first 5–20 meters, and shows you how to build progressions and systems around what you see.
But there is another constraint deliberately built into the module:
It has to work in team sport.
That means being able to build 30–40 minute acceleration blocks when time and space are limited, rather than designing a perfect speed session that only works when speed is the sole priority.
The question therefore morphs from:
'What are some good acceleration drills?' to: 'What acceleration problem am I trying to solve, and how should I build the session around it?'
That is a very different way of thinking about application.
Danny Foley: Why Health Matters
Danny starts with a key premise: availability is the foundation of performance. An athlete cannot consistently express or develop speed if the demands being placed on them repeatedly exceed what they have the capacity to tolerate.
Why Health Matters looks at the relationship between output and capacity, and at injury as a multifactorial process rather than something with a single cause. Workload, physical capacity and movement all contribute, and understanding those relationships gives you a better basis for deciding what an athlete needs.
Danny also introduces different injury pathways, including structural, functional and technical contributors, and considers how injury can affect an athlete’s longer-term development and performance trajectory.
For the speed coach, the question is:
What factors are shaping this athlete’s ability to tolerate and consistently express performance?
MONTH 2: THE PLAN MEETS A COMPLEX SYSTEM
One of the uncomfortable realities of coaching is that a sensible plan does not guarantee a predictable response.
You can write a good session. The progression makes sense. The loading is appropriate. The athletes have completed similar work before.
One athlete flies. Another looks flat. A third responds in a way you did not anticipate.
It is tempting to treat that variability as a problem to eliminate.
Month 2 asks whether it might be more useful to treat it as information.
ALTIS: Complexity & Systems in Coaching
The second ALTIS module moves into parts, relationships and purpose; nonlinearity and emergence; and what it means to work with, rather than against, complex systems.
Put an athlete in front of you and those apparently abstract ideas become very practical.
An athlete is continually interacting with their environment. The session you prescribe is only one influence among many. Sleep, nutrition, emotional state, practice, competition, accumulated stress and previous training all contribute to the system you are observing.
History matters too.
Every intervention lands on everything that came before it. Two athletes can look remarkably similar and respond very differently to the same session because the systems receiving that session are not the same.
Then there is nonlinearity.
We like training plans that suggest orderly relationships between input and output. Add this stimulus, receive that adaptation. Increase the input, increase the output.
Biological systems are rarely that cooperative.
A small intervention can sometimes create a significant change. A substantial intervention may produce very little. Progress can arrive in waves, plateaus and occasional regressions rather than following the clean trajectory we draw on paper.
And some outcomes are emergent. They arise through interactions within the system rather than being predictable from one component viewed in isolation.
The objective is not to abandon planning, measurement or precision.
It is to understand the kind of system those tools are being applied to.
The athlete’s response itself becomes information.
Instead of only asking whether the athlete completed the plan, we can ask:
What did the response tell us about the athlete, the intervention and the relationship between the two?
That is a much more valuable coaching question.
Les Spellman: Max Velocity — On Field
Now take that thinking back onto the field.
Les’s second module addresses how to safely and systematically expose athletes to upright speed and build a repeatable max-velocity progression.
The first distinction is between acceleration and upright sprinting.
During acceleration, the athlete is projecting forward, working through relatively longer ground contacts and lower body angles, and building velocity.
At top speed, the task changes. The athlete is upright. Force needs to be applied rapidly, braking needs to be limited and velocity needs to be maintained.
Different task. Different things to observe.
This is where Les gets into the relationship between shapes and patterns.
A still image can tell you something about a position the athlete reaches.
But sprinting is not a collection of still images.
As the Month 2 classroom material puts it:
“The pattern between the shapes matters more.”
That distinction matters because it is easy to identify an aesthetically undesirable position and immediately try to correct it.
An athlete might appear to have a front-side problem, for example, while the actual limiter sits somewhere else: hip extension, ground contact, posture or rhythm.
If you misidentify the constraint, you can choose a perfectly good drill for the wrong problem.
The module therefore moves from understanding what you are seeing into a progression from drills to wickets to flys, with the progression selected according to the athlete’s level and context.
And eventually, you have to confront another layer of reality:
Where does max-velocity work fit in the week?
Team-sport athletes do not exist inside isolated speed programs. They practice. They lift. They compete. They accumulate fatigue from technical and tactical work. They have finite time and finite capacity.
So Les’s curriculum goes beyond teaching max-velocity development in isolation. It addresses how to place max-velocity days alongside team practice without overwhelming the athlete.
Again, the system matters.
Now put all three perspectives together
And we return to one apparently simple question:
Does this athlete need more max-velocity exposure?
The Complexity & Systems perspective helps you understand what you are looking at, recognize the relationships influencing the athlete and avoid reducing the problem to one convenient variable.
The Practice and Performance perspective helps you understand what upright speed demands, identify what may be limiting the athlete, select an appropriate progression and determine where that work belongs within the week.
The Health-Performance perspective helps you think about health and performance as a probability problem, using what you know about the athlete to make better decisions around load and sequencing.
How to think. How to apply. How to sustain.
You do not make those decisions in neat isolation. You make them together.
That is why Team Speed unites three interdependent domains that are usually siloed: Complexity & Systems thinking, Practice and Performance, and the Health-Performance Interface.
Rather than asking you to collect those pieces from different disciplines and work out how they fit together, the certification is designed to help you understand the connections between them.
And this is only a partial preview of the first two months.
“It’s one of the best investments in myself I have ever made. I couldn’t recommend Team Speed highly enough.”
— Angelo Medina Hubert, Athletic Performance Coach & Owner, Medina Athletic Systems
The full six-month curriculum
Months 1 and 2 give you a sense of how the three perspectives work together, but they represent only the beginning of Level I.
Across six months, the curriculum develops from the foundations of coaching and acceleration into complexity, max velocity, deceleration and change of direction, profiling, programming, individualization, health, readiness and the wider systems that influence how speed is developed and sustained in team sport.
You can see the complete six-month progression by clicking below including every module from ALTIS, Les Spellman and Danny Foley.
Level I begins October 19
Developing speed in team sport requires you to understand the whole system. The principles and systems that underpin speed development, how to translate them into profiling, drills, progressions and programming, and the health-performance interface that shapes what an athlete can tolerate and express.
These are different parts of the same job, and Team Speed was built to connect them.
The Team Speed Coach Certification is the first of its kind: a fully comprehensive, multi-level certification in speed for team sport. Across Level I, ALTIS, Les Spellman and Danny Foley bring together three connected perspectives: how to think, how to apply it, and how to sustain it.
We’ve zoomed all the way out to understand how you develop a speed system, and all the way back down to how you implement it with the athlete in front of you today.
Level I begins October 19 and is delivered through a six-month guided learning period, with a curriculum that builds progressively throughout the program.
Right now, you can join Cohort 2 for $699. That reduced price is available through September 28, when enrollment increases to $799. You can also spread the cost across six monthly payments of $150.
If you already know Team Speed is something you want to be part of, there’s a clear advantage to joining before the price changes.
We’ll be sharing much more from inside Team Speed as we get closer to October 19, including further curriculum previews, practical material and examples of how the three perspectives come together.
Our first Team Speed cohort sold out, and we heard from plenty of people afterwards who wished they hadn’t waited. If you know you want to be part of Cohort 2, secure your place now. You’ll join at the current $699 price before it increases to $799 on September 29, and you won’t risk missing out as we get closer to October 19.
