If you're asking "why is my son slow at sport?", the honest answer is that it's rarely his effort and it's rarely his genetics. Most of the time nobody has measured which part of his speed is holding him back. So he does more of what he already does, and nothing changes. Speed has over 100 subcategories. Until you know which ones are costing him, more training is a guess.
Watch: the video this post comes from
It's not his effort and it's not his genetics
Here's what I see every off season. A player is in the gym every week, doing his strength work, and he still can't get away from anyone on the pitch. He doesn't know what his strength is and he doesn't know what his weakness is. So he trains harder at the same things, comes back for pre-season, and he's exactly where he was.
Getting stronger doesn't always translate to getting faster. And telling a kid it's genetics is a really convenient answer. It lets everyone off the hook. Coaches don't have to get better, parents don't have to question the system, and the kid just gets told it wasn't meant to be.
That's not what's going on.
Why is my son slow at sport when others seem "naturally" quick?
A lot of what looks like natural talent is volume. I lived this. I left home at 16 to play professional football in Europe. What nobody explained to me was that the players I was up against had been in pressure, game-specific football since they were 6 or 7. By 18 they'd received the ball with a centre back stepping into them maybe 3,000 times. I'd done it maybe 50.
Their nervous system already knew what was coming before the ball arrived. Mine was still working it out in real time. In training I was fine. In games, where everything happens in milliseconds, it fell apart. That's not a talent gap. That's a pattern recognition gap, and it's closable.
So when your son looks a step behind, ask: is he actually slow over the ground, or is he slow to start because he's still thinking? Those are different problems.
More games won't fix it
The usual advice is "just play more". Do the maths on that. In a 90 minute match, how often does the one scenario that's beating him actually show up? Maybe four or five times. Across a 40 match season that's around 200 reps of the thing he needs. You can't build a nervous system change off four reps a week. The dose is too low.
Now strip the game down. Take that one scenario and set it up so it repeats every 15 seconds instead of every 8 minutes. That's 200 reps in a single session. What a season gives you, you can get in an hour if it's designed right. See?
Speed works the same way. I don't tell athletes to go run more and hope. I break it into blocks. Ground contact time, which is how long the foot stays on the ground each stride, is one block. Projection angle, the direction he's pushing himself, is another. Force through the hip is another. Each one gets its own measurement, its own target and its own plan. When one moves, we go to the next.
What a proper look shows a parent
A free speed test tells you where your son is. That's useful. A proper assessment tells you why. Every run filmed at 240 frames a second, timed on electronic gates, and compared twice: against the standard for his age and level, and against the level above, where he wants to go.
What usually comes out is not one thing. It's the one thing costing him the most, and a few others behind it, in order. Then it's set out as a road map with numbers, so he's retested against real targets and you both know if he's on track.
I watch the first 10 minutes closely, too. Those minutes show two things: coordination, and the character to turn up on the line dialled in and give your best effort.
Slow at 11 isn't slow forever
George was running 17 to 19 km/h at 11. He now runs 35 km/h. Billy went from 22 km/h to 36 km/h over four years. Hais, our head coach, started at 17 to 18 km/h and now runs 38 km/h. None of them were told to just try harder. They were measured, and they fixed things in the right order.
That's the difference between a ceiling and a bottleneck. A ceiling is permanent. A bottleneck isn't. Right? For more on the talent question, read is speed genetic, and for how this plays out over the teenage years, read youth speed development.
If he's on a high level pathway, the first step is finding his bottleneck.