Certified speed coaching for the athlete you have already invested in.
Club fees. Travel. Showcases. Camps. Certified coaching is what makes the rest of it count. Four credentials in speed, movement and sport conditioning, applied one athlete at a time.
Velocity does not rise in a straight line, it follows this curve. τ sets how hard an athlete accelerates, Vmax sets where they top out, and two split times solve for both. That is what the first tool below does.
The same models a sports scientist would use, running in your browser. Bring a stopwatch and a measured distance. Nothing is stored, nothing is sent, and you do not have to book anything to use them.
Two split times and a bodyweight give you top speed, how hard the athlete accelerates, and the force they put into the ground.
How to run it: one all-out sprint from a standing start. Take a split at a short distance and again at a long one, e.g. 10 and 40 yards. Both splits must come from the same run.
One split from a dead stop, turned into average acceleration and the speed reached at that line.
How to run it: start from a complete standstill, no rolling start, and time to a single marked line. Short distances work best, ten to twenty yards.
True top speed, measured in a zone the athlete enters already at full pace, with the acceleration taken out.
How to run it: give a run-up of at least 20 yards, then time a short flying zone, e.g. 10 yards. The clock starts as they enter the zone, not when they start running.
Splits speed into its two parts, so you can see whether an athlete is short-striding or slow-turning-over.
How to run it: film the run on a phone and count every foot contact across the timed distance. Both feet count. Left, right, left is three.
Models as published — Samozino et al., sprint force–velocity profiling, Morin sprint FVP spreadsheet. Hand timing carries roughly a tenth of a second of error, so treat these as a baseline to re-test against, not a verdict.
Acceleration and top speed are not the same quality, they are not produced the same way, and they are not trained the same way. In elite athletes the biggest differences over short distances show up at two and five meters, and they track how well force is put into the ground horizontally.2
Top speed. Reached past roughly thirty meters, running tall, where force turns vertical and the foot is on the ground for a fraction of a second. It is also the first thing fatigue takes: after a match, top-end velocity degrades more than acceleration does.7
How quickly speed is gained. The first steps out of a stance, a cut or a stop. Force goes into the ground behind the athlete, at roughly forty-five degrees.
The clock the other two are measured against. Acceleration without a stopwatch is an opinion. With one it is a number that either moved or did not.
Youth performance training is an unlicensed field, which makes the letters the only real standard in it. Ted holds four, from two national bodies, and every one of them can be checked. Here is what each is worth to your athlete.
The credential that separates a speed coach from a conditioning coach. NSPA's course is built around improving speed and agility for an athlete in any sport: how the foot strikes, how an athlete accelerates out of a cut, how to change direction without giving up a step. The goal is not more running. It is better running.
NASM's CPT is the NCCA-accredited base credential and the most widely recognized certification in fitness. It is the one that says a coach was examined on anatomy, program design and how to load a body safely, before ever handing a young athlete a workout.
This is the parent's credential. CES is movement assessment and correction: spotting the knee that collapses inward, the ankle that will not bend, the hip that never fully extends, then fixing the cause instead of stretching the symptom. Growing athletes compensate faster than they adapt, and a compensation trained at speed is how a season ends early.
NASM's strength-and-conditioning track: plyometrics, speed, agility, resistance training and Olympic lifting, organized across a season rather than dropped in at random. It is what turns a number in the weight room into a faster first step in a real game.
Verify any of them yourself. That is the point of a certification.
NSPA nspa.org
· NASM nasm.org
Each credential is built on a published framework that a coach is examined on before they are awarded it. Below is what NSPA and NASM actually require behind each set of initials, in their own sequence. It is why a certified coach and an enthusiastic one are not the same purchase.
NASM's Corrective Exercise Continuum is a fixed four-step order for anything the screen turns up.
Stretching the sore part treats the symptom. This sequence goes after the cause, in that order, every time.
NASM's OPT model is a periodized progression through three levels, and an athlete earns the next one.
Jump training follows the same ladder. Early on a landing is held for three to five seconds before the next rep. Later it becomes repetitive and reactive, because by then the landing is safe.
NSPA's speed course is built around four training targets, coached separately because they are different skills.
Speed that only shows up in a straight line on a turf lane was never the point. It has to survive a game.
Methodology as published by the certifying bodies — NASM Corrective Exercise Continuum, NASM OPT Model, NSPA Certified Speed & Agility Coach.
Acceleration, movement quality and change of direction are the same physical qualities underneath every field and court sport. Which is why the training is not built around a sport. It is built around an athlete.
Not a class you are enrolled into and not a rotation of staff. Ted holds the credentials, Ted runs the session, and Ted is the one who saw your athlete move in week one.
Two sprinters on the academy mark, one of each, and that is deliberate. A meta-analysis of 26 trials in female adolescent team-sport athletes found large improvements in sprint and change-of-direction speed from exactly this kind of training.4
One athlete, a handful of teammates, or a full roster on a club or school schedule. The framework does not change, only how many are running it.
Ted runs KC's Sports Academy Youth Sports Performance in Olathe, coaching speed, movement quality and sport conditioning for young athletes across the Kansas City metro.
He is a certified speed coach through the National Sports Performance Association and holds three credentials from the National Academy of Sports Medicine: Certified Personal Trainer, Corrective Exercise Specialist and Performance Enhancement Specialist. That combination is deliberate. One covers how to make an athlete faster, one covers how to load a body safely, one covers how to find the movement fault first, and one covers how to build a season around all three.
In his own words, the academy develops young athletes "using adaptation and progression to promote efficiency and maximum effectiveness on the field or court."
Boys and girls, field sports and court sports. Team inquiries go to teams@kcssportsacademy.com.
Sessions, drills and athlete work, posted as it happens. The quickest way to see how Ted coaches before you book anything.
Tell Ted what your athlete is working toward and when you are available. He responds personally. Prefer to speak first? (816) 679-1642.
Not sure which one? Say so below and Ted will tell you where to start.
Give a couple of windows that work and Ted will come back with a time.
Check it over. Ted gets this the moment you send it.
This booking flow is built to take payment at this step. The merchant account and gateway are the academy's call, so the slot is deliberately empty. Until it is wired, Ted confirms the session and settles it directly.
Ted will confirm shortly. If it is urgent, call or text (816) 679-1642.
West Olathe, minutes from Gardner, Lenexa and south Overland Park.
Every claim on this page about how speed works, and every model behind the tools, comes from peer-reviewed research or from the certifying bodies themselves. Findings are paraphrased in one line. Follow the DOI to the original.
Peer-reviewed sources retrieved from PubMed. Findings are paraphrased; follow each DOI to the original study. Nothing here is medical advice, and none of these studies were conducted on KC's Sports Academy athletes.
Certification methodology as published by the awarding bodies: NSPA Certified Speed & Agility Coach, NASM Corrective Exercise Continuum, NASM OPT Model, NASM PES speed, agility and quickness.
Speed is coachable. Movement faults are findable. Both require someone credentialed to look for them.