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Derek Hansen from SprintCoach joins the show today to talk all things speed, including sprinting, acceleration, coaching, his time with Charlie Francis, adapting to your athletes, subjective and objective experiences, auditing yourself, and implementing protocols for team and individual sports. After playing sports through college, Derek jumped over to the coaching side when he went to graduate school and decided to coach track athletes in his free time. After figuring out a 9-5 engineering job wasn’t for him, he worked coaching back into his life and eventually started his own sprint group. This led to a university strength and conditioning gig while he continued to put out his own articles and content. Derek has spoken at the NFL combine and helped NFL teams develop their athletes, and now primarily focuses on speed for team sports. He has also turned all of his knowledge into a series of courses called https://www.runningmechanics.com/ (Running Mechanics Professional). There’s no denying that speed is important in all sports, but the development can be drastically different depending on the sport. You have to look at the specific demands of the sport and adapt your sprint training accordingly. For instance, a basketball player is going to need acceleration, but a special teams player on a football field may regularly need 100 yard sprint speed. Another large consideration is that time is a huge constraint for coaches, and you need to learn to be flexible. The ability to take sprint concepts and condense them down for the respective sport will go a long way for your athletes. Derek was lucky enough to spend around 10 years working with Charlie Francis, so we dug into some of the big takeaways he has from that experience. The biggest takeaway Derek has is adapting to the strengths of your athlete. Every circumstance and athlete is different, and the direct applications of Charlie Francis were completely different depending on the context and strengths of each athlete he worked with. Another interesting note here is that Charlie didn’t plan workouts like most coaches do today, and many times he would change programming during the session due to the stimulus he was observing. While he had an idea of where he wanted his athletes to be and where they were going, he operated more off of a “gut feel” based on what the athlete is showing him.  This sparks a conversation on the way we program and track our athletes today and if always having predetermined long term plans might be making our coaching and athletes more fragile. Derek draws the comparison of coaching to stand up comedy, and just comics need to always be developing new material and adjusting to their audiences, as a coach you need to be doing the same for your athletes. You want concepts and principles as guides and then to be agile with those concepts, which takes years of experience and critical thinking to develop.  Another challenge with sprint training is that it’s extremely hard to measure the on field effectiveness of the training. Lots of coaches aim to use measurable tests in the weightroom in order to demonstrate their prowess as a coach, but those don’t necessarily translate to on the field performance. Derek aims to find the balance between the weight room and qualities needed for the athlete’s sport. Much of this was learned through years of trial and error.This is why real life experience cannot be emphasized enough for young coaches along with the willingness to fail. While research studies can point us in the right direction, they fail to observe the effort over long periods of time.  We transition here to look at the process Derek goes through when starting with a new team on speed development. In general most coaches aren’t as familiar with speed concepts as they might be with weight lifting, so Derek’s first step is to educate the team and staff on what speed training actually is. Sometimes he will simply go through his courses...