Most youth speed training is coordination training wearing a costume.
Ladder drills, cone patterns, reaction dots on the ground — parents see their kid moving fast through a drill and assume speed is being built. It isn’t. Those tools develop footwork and rhythm, which have their place, but they don’t ask the body to produce more force, more quickly, into the ground. And force production is what speed actually is.
Speed is a strength quality expressed at high velocity. An athlete gets faster by improving how much horizontal force they can apply and how fast they can apply it — not by rehearsing more complex footwork patterns. This is why an athlete can look sharp and coordinated in a ladder drill and still be the same 10-yard-sprint speed they were three months ago. The drill trained coordination. It never asked the tissue, the nervous system, or the mechanics to adapt.
The second piece most programs miss: acceleration and top-end speed are different skills with different mechanics. The first three to five steps—often the ones that decide critical soccer moments—require a forward body lean and aggressive ground contact. Max-velocity sprinting, typically reached twenty or more meters into a sprint, requires a more upright posture and a completely different stride pattern. Soccer speed extends beyond accelerating or sprinting in a straight line. Players must separate from defenders in the first two steps, reach high speeds over longer distances, and move unpredictably in multiple directions. Training only one of these qualities—or training all of them the same way—leaves gaps that show up in games. That is why we train acceleration, max velocity, multidirectional movement, change of direction, and curvilinear sprinting as distinct skills that must ultimately transfer to the game.
The third piece, and the one almost no youth program touches: deceleration. Soccer is a sport of change of direction, not just top speed. An athlete who can’t absorb force and stop under control is one hard cut away from an ankle, knee, or hamstring injury — and can’t be genuinely explosive if their body is bracing against the risk of losing control. Speed training that ignores deceleration is training half the skill.
Progress rarely moves in a straight line, and it shouldn’t. Look at any athlete’s testing history closely and you’ll find weeks where a number holds flat or even dips before it jumps again. That’s not a program failing — it’s the body absorbing a stimulus, recovering, and adapting on its own timeline, not on a chart’s timeline.
Think of it like a recipe. Consistency, periodized training, and recovery are the ingredients. Skip one, overdo another, or stop halfway through, and the result falls short — even if everything else was right. Follow the recipe as written, in the right proportions, all the way through, and the outcome holds: the body adapts, and performance trends up over time, even when the path there wasn’t a straight line.
One more thing worth saying plainly: be careful comparing your athlete to anyone but themselves. Genetics set a different starting line for every athlete — height, limb length, and maturation timing all vary widely at this age, and none of it is something training controls. The athlete who looks effortlessly fast right now may simply be further along their own growth curve. What we can control, and what we measure, is whether an athlete is improving relative to where they started. That’s the number that matters — and it’s the one most likely to get overlooked when the only comparison being made is to the most gifted kid on the field.
This is part of why we track each athlete’s growth and maturation status alongside their testing, not just their times and jump heights. Height velocity and growth timing shape how a given month’s numbers should be read — an athlete moving through a growth spurt is working with a different body than they were three months ago, and that context changes what the data means.
Three Things We Prioritize in Speed Development
Force application, not footwork complexity. We build the strength and mechanics to put more force into the ground, faster — the actual physical basis of speed.
Acceleration and top-end speed as separate skills. Both get trained, with the mechanics specific to each, because most game-deciding moments happen in the first few steps.
Deceleration and change of direction as speed qualities. An athlete who can stop and redirect under control is faster in the ways that matter on a field, and far less likely to get hurt doing it.
Speed isn’t a talent you either have or don’t — it’s a trainable physical quality with a clear mechanism behind it, and it responds to the same kind of structured, progressive work as strength or conditioning. That’s how we build it: force-velocity profiling and testing to see where an athlete actually needs development, then a program built around acceleration mechanics, top-end mechanics, and deceleration in the right proportions for their age and stage.
If you want to see where your athlete’s speed actually stands — not guess at it — we offer a free trial session for first-time visitors. It’s a low-pressure way to get real information before deciding anything else.
Luis Jeronimo, MS, CSCS | Founder, LJ PERFORMANCE
Luis Jeronimo is a High Performance Coach, consultant, and innovator who has operated at the highest levels of sport - from Olympic programs, to the private sector working with some of the most elite athletes in the world, to multiple MLS clubs. He is the architect behind the performance systems and winning cultures those organizations have run on.
Today, he runs LJ PERFORMANCE in Columbus, OH, with one mission: to demonstrate what true high performance in soccer looks like — by fusing elite-level performance, recovery, technical, tactical, and holistic methods drawn from his time at the highest levels of sport, building a unique standard the next generation of athletes will train by.
That same standard - the systems, monitoring, and coaching used with professional athletes - is what every athlete at LJ PERFORMANCE trains under.