Sports Speed is a web-based coach-education resource from Atlee Mahorn, MBA, OLY, a three-time Olympian. It combines a 16-week Short-to-Long framework with seven-sport education and practical tools so high-school staffs can connect acceleration, speed development, maximum velocity, competition preparation, strength, warm-up, recovery, and whole-athlete topics. It is decision support—not individualized medical advice or a guarantee of outcomes.
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What is Sports Speed?
Sports Speed is a coach-education platform that translates Olympic sprint principles into an accessible multi-sport coaching context. It is designed primarily for high school coaches who may need to plan speed development without a full sports-science department. The resource organizes speed education, structured training guidance, and practical performance concepts in one web-based environment.
The central idea is not that every athlete should receive the same sprint session. It is that a staff can use a shared language for acceleration, speed, power, movement, recovery, and the competitive season. Coaches can then use their own sport knowledge, athlete context, qualified supervision, and available testing to make responsible decisions.
Sports Speed also goes beyond a library of drills. The educational scope includes strength, warm-up, recovery, movement quality, mental performance, nutrition, and hydration. These subjects are presented as connected coaching topics, not as a promise that one platform can replace a coach, sports-medicine professional, sports dietitian, or sport-specific expert.
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The Sports Speed brief is written for high school coaches and athletic directors.
What does the 16-week framework teach?
The 16-week framework teaches a Short-to-Long sequence: build understanding and quality in shorter acceleration work, connect it to speed development and maximum velocity, then relate the work to competition preparation. The sequence gives a staff a way to discuss progression across a training block without pretending that one calendar fits every school, sport, or athlete.
| Framework focus | What coaches study | Planning question |
|---|---|---|
| Acceleration | How an athlete starts, projects force, and creates useful early speed. | What does the athlete need to express in the first part of a play or race? |
| Speed development | How acceleration connects to upright running, rhythm, and progressively faster movement. | What quality should improve before the staff adds more intensity or distance? |
| Maximum velocity | How high-speed movement is understood within the athlete's event or sport context. | When is higher-speed exposure appropriate, and what recovery does it require? |
| Competition preparation | How speed work fits the season, competition calendar, and need to express rather than accumulate fatigue. | What should be maintained, adjusted, or removed as competition approaches? |
This is an educational progression, not an automatic prescription. A coach should consider age, training history, readiness, surface, equipment, practice schedule, competition calendar, and supervision before applying any training idea. The framework helps a staff organize those conversations; it does not remove them.
For a deeper explanation of periodization and the Short-to-Long concept, read The 16-Week Speed Plan. For the decision between general and sport-specific work, see Why Position-Specific Speed Wins.
How does seven-sport education help a coaching staff?
Seven-sport education helps a school staff compare principles while respecting that each sport has different movement and training demands. Sports Speed covers football, soccer, basketball, baseball, lacrosse, track and field, and hockey. The point is not to give every sport the same workout. It is to give coaches a common framework for asking what speed means in their setting.
| Sport | Educational lens |
|---|---|
| Football | Connect sprint education to position, acceleration, strength, and the season's practice demands. |
| Soccer | Consider speed, repeated efforts, movement quality, and decisions within a long competitive environment. |
| Basketball | Relate acceleration, power, deceleration, and reactive movement to court actions and practice density. |
| Baseball | Study short bursts, movement quality, and how strength and power support brief high-intensity actions. |
| Lacrosse | Connect speed development with repeated movement, changes of direction, and the sport's field demands. |
| Track and field | Use sprint education to discuss acceleration, maximum velocity, event demands, and competition preparation. |
| Hockey | Use the framework as off-ice coaching education while respecting that skating has its own technical demands. |
These are education lenses, not individualized prescriptions. A shared resource can help an athletic director support consistent language across departments, while each coach still adapts the discussion to event, position, season, and athlete. The executive summary also notes that module coverage can differ: seven sports appear in the educational content, while the current Training Builder lists six. Schools should validate the fit through their own supervision, policies, and coaching process.
What performance concepts and tools are included?
Sports Speed includes force-velocity profiling, physics-based analysis, and visual explanations that make the relationship between force, speed, power, and movement easier to discuss. The purpose is to make technical concepts more approachable for coaches—not to imply that a chart is a verified longitudinal athlete record.
- Force and velocity: use the concepts to ask whether a training conversation needs more attention to force production, movement speed, or the relationship between them.
- Testing and calculators: treat outputs as decision support that depends on the inputs, measurement approach, and assumptions behind the calculation.
- Training Builder: the current signed-in interface presents a simplified progression chart based on entered context; it should not be described as a fully individualized, saved session-by-session prescription.
- Monitoring conversations: use session-RPE, workload, HRV, and wellness inputs as structured ways to discuss readiness and training load—not as medical diagnosis.
Coaches looking for a focused introduction to one tool can read Force-Velocity Profiling and What Is Velocity-Based Training?. The public Speed Library provides the broader article collection and filters.
How does whole-athlete education fit the speed framework?
Speed work sits inside a training environment. Sports Speed therefore includes education around warm-ups, recovery, movement quality, mental preparation, fueling, and hydration alongside sprint and strength topics. The benefit of this structure is organizational: a coach can connect a speed discussion to the rest of a training week instead of treating a sprint drill as an isolated answer.
Recovery inputs can help a staff talk about readiness and accumulated training load, but they do not diagnose injury, prescribe treatment, or guarantee injury prevention. Wearable ingestion and automated sensor monitoring should not be assumed from these interfaces. Any athlete with pain, illness, medical concerns, or a return-to-play question needs qualified healthcare guidance.
How can athletic directors evaluate a shared coaching resource?
Athletic directors can evaluate Sports Speed as an expertise-led educational resource for staff alignment—not as proof of performance outcomes. A sensible review asks whether the material is understandable, whether coaches can connect it to their seasons, whether the school's supervision and policies are respected, and whether staff can use the ideas consistently across sports.
- Start with the staff's questions. Identify where coaches need a common language: acceleration, planning, force-velocity concepts, recovery, or season integration.
- Map education to the calendar. Compare the 16-week framework with each sport's off-season, pre-season, competition, and transition periods.
- Keep responsibility visible. Confirm that qualified coaches and appropriate medical or nutrition professionals retain responsibility for decisions in their disciplines.
- Review the boundaries. Treat outputs as input-dependent coaching support, and distinguish working tools from illustrative displays or unverified outcome claims.
- Test usefulness before making promises. A supervised pilot can examine usability, coaching adoption, and planning value before a school makes broader performance claims.
This approach matches the product's stated role: practical support for coaching decisions rather than a replacement for qualified supervision, medical advice, or sport-specific expertise. It also gives a school a way to assess whether a shared education resource is useful without inventing customer results, school partnerships, or guaranteed improvements.
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Frequently asked questions
What is Sports Speed?
Sports Speed is a web-based coaching and coach-education resource by Atlee Mahorn, MBA, OLY. It brings together a 16-week Short-to-Long speed-development framework, seven-sport educational content, and practical performance decision-support tools.
Which sports does Sports Speed cover?
Sports Speed's educational content covers football, soccer, basketball, baseball, lacrosse, track and field, and hockey.
Does Sports Speed generate individualized training prescriptions?
No. Sports Speed is primarily an educational and decision-support resource. Its current Training Builder presents a simplified progression chart; it should not be described as a fully individualized, saved session-by-session prescription.
What does the 16-week framework teach?
The 16-week framework teaches a Short-to-Long progression that connects acceleration, speed development, maximum velocity, and competition preparation. Coaches use the sequence to organize learning and planning, then adapt it to the athlete, sport, season, and qualified supervision available.
Are the performance tools medical advice or a guarantee of athlete outcomes?
No. Calculators, visualizations, and recovery inputs are coaching decision support. Outputs depend on the quality of inputs and assumptions, and they are not medical diagnosis, injury-prevention guarantees, or proof of longitudinal athlete outcomes.
Sources and scope note
This article is based on Sports Speed | For High School Coaches & Athletic Directors and the Sports Speed Executive Summary | Product & Strategic Value, plus the public Sports Speed article library. The source materials describe a web-based coach-education resource and its reviewed capabilities; they do not establish verified customer, revenue, or athlete-performance totals. Feature coverage can differ by module, so coaches should confirm current interfaces and terms before relying on them.