Building a Speed Assessment Tool: What I Learned.

Athletes Needed a Better Way to Track Their Speed.

The idea started simple. As a speed coach, I run a lot of assessments. Hand-timed sprints from a stopwatch. Results from digital timing systems like VALD SmartSpeed Plus, Swift Performance, and Brower gates. Vertical jump tests. And for years, all of that data was being recorded but not really used in a way athletes could connect with.

I wanted something easy to use. Hand times from a stopwatch or digital times from a timing system. Input the data, see clear results. And when a new assessment was logged, I wanted those results to tell a story rather than sit in a spreadsheet.

A Graph and a Timeline. Simple Start.

The first version did one thing: showed progress over time. Enter a test result, pick a date, and the tool would plot it on a graph alongside previous assessments. You could see at a glance whether you were trending faster or stalling.

It worked. Coaches liked getting notifications when a new assessment was logged. Athletes liked seeing their own improvement visualised. But pretty quickly, a question kept coming up during debriefs that the tool could not answer: how does this compare?

From Progress Tracking to Context.

To answer that question properly, I went back to the athletes. I asked them what feedback mattered most to them. What came back was consistent: they wanted context. Not just "you ran faster than last month" but "where does that put you compared to athletes your age?"

That feedback comes up most when athletes are trying to make representative teams or apply for development academies. They are being benchmarked by selectors and they have no idea how they measure up. The gap between a personal best and a selection standard felt invisible, even to athletes who were training hard.

That became the next layer of the tool.

Adding Published Benchmarks.

I pulled together published research on the three tests we run most often: 20 metre sprint, flying 30 metre sprint, and vertical jump. The dataset covers ages 13 to 30 across both team sport and track and field athletes. Research published specifically for that population, not generalised adult norms.

Now when an athlete enters a result, the tool plots them against those benchmarks and tells them where they sit. Four levels:

The response from athletes was immediate. Knowing where you stand relative to a real benchmark changes how you think about training. It gives a time target meaning.

Changing Sport Changes Everything.

One of the most useful additions came from working with dual-sport athletes. A lot of the athletes we coach play multiple sports: athletics and AFL, athletics and cricket, athletics and rugby. Their speed results mean different things depending on which sport they are being assessed for.

So we added a sport selector. Choose your sport and the benchmarks recalibrate. The same 20 metre time might read as high school level against track and field norms, but semi-professional level for cricket or AFL.

That changes the conversation in a session. Athletes frustrated with their progress in one context realised they were already performing at a high level in another. It opens a real discussion about which sport to prioritise heading into a key season.

Still Building.

The tool is live and athletes are using it. The notification and tracking system works well. The benchmark comparison is the feature that gets the most engagement.

What I learned most from this build is that athletes do not just want data. They want data that means something to them, in their context, for their goals. Every layer we added to this tool came directly from listening to that feedback.

More tests, more sports, and sharper visualisations are on the roadmap. But the foundation is there: a tool that turns a sprint time into a real conversation about where an athlete is and where they are going.