October 7, 2026 — When high school football programs head outdoors during the off-season to sharpen their speed and agility, preparation often falters not from a lack of effort, but from a fragmentation of purpose. According to performance coach Steve Haggerty, too many coaches fall into the trap of trying to improve every athletic quality and movement pattern within a single, overloaded training session.
Reflecting on his work this summer with local high school football teams, Haggerty observed a distinct disconnect in how field workouts are designed compared to traditional weightroom sessions. While strength coaches meticulously structure gym routines—allocating specific days to upper body strength, lower body power, and complementary movements like squats, lunges, Romanian deadlifts, and hip thrusts—on-field speed programs often lack that same cohesive long-term vision. Coaches generally understand that enhancing a football player’s squat requires targeted programming, yet field sessions frequently devolve into generalized running without a singular, dedicated physiological objective.
Begin by Defining the Objective of the Day
Drawing on a foundational philosophy first articulated by renowned strength coach Charles Poliquin—who famously noted that a person has only one rear end and cannot sit on two horses—Haggerty emphasizes that athletes cannot successfully adapt to every athletic demand simultaneously.
Whether a coaching staff aims to improve linear acceleration, maximum velocity, deceleration, change of direction, curved running, or lateral displacement, Haggerty insists that session planners must select just one primary focus per day. While all of these movement patterns are essential for football players over the course of a season, isolating a single target simplifies the training stimulus and maximizes adaptation. For the purpose of off-season field development, Haggerty frequently centers his approach on maximum velocity sprinting.
Strategic Field Session Planning
The core philosophy behind Haggerty’s methodology relies on pairing technical drills directly with their sprinting applications, treating them as dynamic superseries rather than disjointed conditioning circuits. Fatigue, he notes, is the ultimate enemy of motor learning. While high-volume, highly fatiguing conditioning drills have their place, trying to teach or refine complex running mechanics while an athlete is severely depleted yields poor results.
Conversely, Haggerty rejects the notion that coaches must entirely avoid heavy resistance on speed days. While hauling a heavy sled for 100 yards will inevitably blunt top-end speed performance during that specific session, he views such methods as acceptable trade-offs when building long-term tissue resilience. Early in the off-season, accumulating a higher volume of foundational plyometric and technical work—such as A-skips, B-skips, moving claw mechanics, and ankle kick-backs—fortifies the hip flexors, hamstrings, and ankles against the intense demands of peak sprinting later in the calendar.
As the off-season progresses and transitions into pre-season camp, Haggerty scales back the volume of isolated technical drills, shifting the focus toward a higher volume of raw sprinting. By pairing one or two carefully selected movement drills with their corresponding sprint applications, coaches can bridge the gap between technical proficiency and game-speed execution.
Practical Implementation on the Field
To illustrate how these concepts translate to actual practice, Haggerty points to three distinct structural templates that blend technical drills with high-speed running.
The first approach pairs maximum-velocity sprints with ankling exercises. Working primarily with high school football players who often reach their peak velocity much quicker than Olympic track sprinters, Haggerty keeps primary sprint distances around 30 yards rather than stretching them to 60 or 80 yards. The ankling drill, typically performed over a 10-yard stretch—sometimes preceded by a light 10-yard jog to accelerate ground contact times—serves as a neurological primer. It teaches athletes to quickly flex the hip and recover the foot immediately upon leaving the ground, effectively mitigating the excessive backward leg swing and forward lean common among football players. By integrating this drill directly into a sprint superseries, coaches reduce the need for constant verbal cues during a run, allowing athletes to absorb the movement naturally.
A second methodology utilizes fly sprints, combining a 20-yard acceleration phase with a 10-yard max-velocity window, paired alternately with butt-kick drills. As players progressively extend their butt-kick volume from 10 yards up to 60 yards, the exercise dynamically strengthens the hamstrings and hip flexors. This targeted conditioning helps pull the heel toward the glutes immediately after toe-off, cleaning up the back-side mechanics of the sprint cycle and reducing injury risks historically associated with football.
The final structural example integrates "sprint-float-sprint" intervals—consisting of 10 yards of sprinting, 10 yards of floating or striding, and a final 10 yards of sprinting—alternated with hurdle jumps. Advanced plyometrics like hurdle hops place high demands on the lower extremities, fostering the ankle stiffness and elasticity required to efficiently transfer force into the turf. By systematically alternating between sprint-float-sprint repetitions and hurdle clearances, and carefully managing rest intervals—whether through structured water breaks, verbal countdowns, or purposeful coaching feedback—trainers can maintain high movement quality throughout the session.
Utilizing Drills to Enhance the Sprint
Ultimately, Haggerty stresses that the success of this integrated approach is measured by tangible improvements in movement efficiency. If an off-season program effectively enhances an athlete’s ankle stiffness, improves hamstring recruitment during the recovery phase, and cleans up overall running mechanics, those adaptations will naturally manifest as higher speeds on the field.
For football players, who face constant collision risks and high hamstring strain rates, developing speed-specific tissue resilience is about more than just clocking faster times. By embedding technical mastery directly into high-velocity training blocks, coaches can safeguard their players’ health while simultaneously unlocking new levels of athletic performance.
