A quick thought on middle school rankings
Middle school rankings are a scam. How on earth can you decide who the best 7th grader in the state is in any sport?
Furthermore, why does it matter? The vast majority of middle school athletes are just entering puberty and growth spurts. Some haven’t even started growing at all, while some are nearly done growing.
Having the most athletic potential at age 12 or 13 does not mean that same person will have the most athletic potential at age 17 or 18.
These rankings have a mixed impact for those early developers.
On the plus side, they’re told how great they are and how good they’ll be in the future. They get put on special all-star teams and get special training. The combination of improved self-belief and better training leads to better outcomes.
The downside, though, is that one day their peers will catch up physically. When they’re suddenly not the biggest and fastest, they might not have developed the skillset to compete. They also might not be able to manage the psychological shift of not being the best athlete on the team anymore and develop mental health issues.
These rankings can be horrible for those late developers. They’re told that they’re not good enough (even if it’s not explicitly stated, they can read the room). They get less playing time, less training time, and less access to quality training and competition. The combination of poor self-belief and less training results in worse outcomes (like leaving the sport or not fulfilling their potential).
Parents, don’t buy into the middle school ranking garbage. If your kid is ranked high, allow them to be happy, but keep them grounded.
If they’re overshadowed, keep them fired up for the future and focus on developing the best they can.
A deep dive on quickness
Kyrie Irving, Barry Sanders, Allen Iverson, Tavon Austin, Jamal Crawford.
One word comes to mind when we talk about these athletes: quick.
Does quickness even exist?
You know it when you see it. Everyone sitting on their couch can point to the TV when Kyrie Irving is dribbling a basketball and say “that guy’s the quickest one on the team.”
But, quickness is the one physical ability that remains a mystery in the performance community. It’s been almost impossible to quantify and even more difficult to train.
In fact, it’s so misunderstood that many strength and conditioning coaches deny its importance or even its existence as a physical ability.
I get where they’re coming from- I’ve been that guy. This is one of those “midwit meme” moments in my life. “Movement is just about force… agility and speed are all about how much force you put into the ground… quickness is just a word that fly-by-the-night trainers use to charge Little Johnny money to do stupid ladder drills that don’t translate to the game… yadda yadda yadda”
But, it’s different than speed. Speed is the time it takes to cover a certain distance. I know you’ve seen guys who are really fast sprinters, but they’re not quick and shifty.
It’s also not accurate to say quickness is the same as agility. Agility is the ability to change direction and move in a manner that is consistent with environment. Being quick can underlie agility (and speed), but they’re not synonymous.
What is quickness then?
Quickness can be defined as an athlete’s ability to rapidly contract and relax in a highly coordinated fashion.
I covered a lot of slot receivers in my life. There were plenty of times where my speed tested better than theirs and my agility tested better than theirs, but they were so much quicker than I was that it made it difficult to cover them.
The twitchy movements where they didn’t really go anywhere set them up to gain separation from me, despite me being faster.
Don’t overthink it, we all know what it is when we see it.
How do you get quicker?
Quickness is a software function- how rapidly can the nervous system can stimulate the contraction of an agonist (the muscle we want to move) and the relaxation of an antagonist (the muscle that opposes the muscle we want to move), then rapidly switch the two?
Improving quickness, then, is all about improving that software programming. It’s about making the nervous system as efficient as possible.
Much of this nervous system efficiency is just God-given, genetic ability. So, step 1 is to choose your parents wisely.
The answer is never nature or nurture, though. Most everything is trainable to some degree.
There’s not really research in this area, so we have to rely on anecdotal experience and logic.
There are windows in an your athlete’s life that the nervous system is going to be more plastic, meaning it’s more adaptable and easier to remodel.
The early years are incredibly important for that. Young kids are constantly making new neural connections at insane rates.
Immediately pre-puberty, during puberty, and immediately post puberty are other windows where you’re going to get more bang for your buck. During puberty an athlete’s body changes so much that their software has to recalibrate and learn how to maneuver their new long limbs and denser bodies. Recalibration means that there’s another opportunity to mold a more efficient nervous system.
You can absolutely continue to get quicker later in life- you just likely won’t have an impact on the same order of magnitude as if you take advantage of earlier windows.
The process of actually getting quicker, though, is all about providing frequent, high-intensity inputs. To force the nervous system to adapt to operate at faster speeds, you need to challenge it at its current max capacity.
Some specific examples:
- Footfire as fast as you can for 3-6 seconds.
- Hex drills with various footwork patterns for 3-6 seconds. As fast as you can with getting the patterns correct.
- Ladder drills with various footwork patterns for 3-6 seconds. As fast as you can with getting the patterns correct.
- Lateral runs between two cones 3-5 yards apart as fast as you can for 3-6 seconds
- Lateral runs between 6 cones, where a coach points at the next cone for them to run to for 3-6 seconds.
- You can change this to a partner drill where one partner leads and one follows them.
These can be dosed in on a near daily basis. They have to be executed with 100% intensity or you are completely wasting your time.
These aren’t supposed to be done in place of more true agility work, but as a separate skillset developing specific qualities.
How can you measure it?
I’m a data nerd. “What gets measured gets managed” should be tattooed on my forehead.
Quickness is seemingly impossible to measure, but we have some proxy measures that can give us a good indication of nervous system efficiency.
One of them is a space bar tap test. It’s simple- see how many times you can tap the space bar in 5 seconds. The more taps, the more efficient the nervous system is.
The less times someone has done this in their life, the better the correlation between sport-related quickness and the space bar test will be. If you just do the space bar test a lot, you’ll get quicker at tapping the space bar, but not quicker in your sport. (Those who play a lot of video games might have an unfair advantage here).
The same logic could be applied to more specific skills. Some of the tests I plan to start experimenting with are:
- Straight leg swings: Set up a box 2 inches in front of their foot and a box 2 inches behind their foot, then see how many times they can kick each box while they keep their leg straight in 5 seconds.
- Hip flexor pops: set up a band 5 inches above their knee, then see how many times they can march their knee up into the band and touch the foot back down to the floor in 5 seconds.
Athlete development is sometimes as much art as it is science. Just because we don’t have all the answers yet, doesn’t mean we shouldn’t go and figure it out.
More from me…
- 2024 is geared toward pumping out more educational content on social media. Follow me on Instagram @gtperformance_ to learn all about athlete development.
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Thanks so much for your help in spreading the word about long-term athlete development!
Be >,
Zach
Dr. Zach Guiser, PT, DPT, CSCS