Anytime you hear a conversation about sports, it usually revolves around speed.
“Did you see the game last night?? That breakaway goal was electrifying! He left everyone in his dust!”
You get the point. Speed may be the one thing, when properly trained, that separates you from your competitors. You may not be able to catch the ball every time, but you’ll at least be able to track it down. Stealing bases, open-field tackles, and end-to-end rushes are all forms of break-away speed that are exciting to watch.
Speed Makes The Game Better
From a fan’s perspective, it makes the game fun and much more enjoyable to watch – highlighting what most of the population can only dream of doing.
Being fast, jumping high, and throwing hard are all things we all dream about as kids, but only those with the talent, hard work, and perseverance reach those levels. So, from an athlete’s perspective, speed is one of the skills you can rely on when others temporarily fail.
If a player is struggling to square up on pitches that day, a slapped ball into the hole at short won’t be a problem for the speedsters.
The Advantages Of Being Fast
Speed elevates everyone’s game and gives you a slight mental advantage. Teams will approach a fast player with caution and sometimes have to navigate through a strategy to try and eliminate how you’ll be able to leverage your speed.
Ultimately, speed can completely transform a team on any given game day. The more speed a team possesses, the more in-game adjustments the opposing team will be forced to make.
Building Speed For Long-Term Goals
Speed is seen as crucial in almost every sport and is not only fun to watch, but can serve to compensate an athlete later on in life. Professionally, faster players tend to receive higher pay because there are few and far between that perform at an elite level.
Being fast in high school isn’t classified as elite-level because you are primarily competing against a specific population in high school sports. Therefore, the bar for performance isn’t set too high, but the standards for the bar changes very quickly once you get to college.
Everyone seems to compete at a faster pace because only a small portion of the high school population has moved on to the college level – those being the faster athletes. Faster athletes do better in a college or professional environment because these athletes can remedy errors with speed as a form of recovery.
If You’re Fast, You Can Recover
If you make a bad read on a ball as an outfielder, speed will help you recover, enabling you to make the catch still. Ultimately, your instincts still have to be sharp, but speed allows for minor hiccups not to turn into full-blown in-game-changing events.