Junior athletics gives us numbers everywhere.
Times. Distances. Rankings. Personal bests. Qualification standards. Championship places.
Those numbers matter. They allow us to recognise achievement, measure improvement and understand how an athlete is performing.
But there is another question that is much harder to answer.
What does a performance today actually tell us about the athlete a child might become?
At FAST, we have started exploring that question through the FAST ACT Development Study, an ongoing analysis of more than a decade of historical ACT school athletics results.
Rather than looking only at who was fastest at a particular championship, we are matching athletes across different ages and following what happened to their performances as they grew.
The emerging picture is fascinating.
Being fast young matters.
But it doesn’t tell us how the story ends.
Development Doesn’t Happen at the Same Rate
One of the clearest things visible in the data is how dramatically the rate of improvement can change through adolescence.
Among the ACT boys in our matched 100m samples, typical improvement was approximately 0.98 seconds between ages 12 and 13, followed by approximately 0.52 seconds from 13 to 14 and 0.51 seconds from 14 to 15.
The pattern among girls was different.
Typical improvement in our matched female samples was approximately 0.61 seconds between 11 and 12 and 0.56 seconds between 12 and 13. By 14 to 15, the observed improvement was approximately 0.17 seconds, falling to just 0.07 seconds between 15 and 16.
Those numbers shouldn’t become targets.
We don’t want a parent looking at them and deciding that because their 12-year-old improved by less than 0.98 seconds, something has gone wrong. Nor should a coach claim responsibility for every improvement occurring during a period when an athlete is also growing and maturing rapidly.
Instead, the numbers give us context.
They remind us that a 0.20-second PB does not mean the same thing at every age.
For a younger athlete experiencing rapid development, relatively large changes in performance may be quite normal. For an older athlete whose development curve has begun to flatten, finding another two-tenths of a second can represent an enormous achievement.
That distinction matters when we assess progress.
What About the Kids Who Are Already Fast?
There is a popular and understandable reaction to discussions about junior development: being fast when you’re young doesn’t matter.
Our data suggests the answer is more nuanced.
Among athletes in our matched sample who were already within the top 10%, approximately 73% of girls and 79% of boys remained within the top 10% the following year.
That’s significant.
Early performance clearly contains information. Many children who are very competitive at one age remain very competitive a year later.
We should not diminish their achievements by pretending otherwise.
A child who wins a championship has won a championship. An athlete running exceptional times for their age deserves to have that performance recognised.
The mistake comes when we make the next leap.
Fast now does not automatically mean fastest later.
From the Middle of the Field to 10.91
One athlete in our historical ACT data demonstrates why.
At 12, he ran 14.44 for 100m.
That placed him around the middle of the championship field. There would have been little in that result alone to suggest that we were looking at one of the fastest future athletes in his age group.
At 17, he ran 10.91.
He had moved from around the middle of the field to around the top.
That doesn’t mean every 12-year-old running 14.44 will eventually run close to 11 seconds. They won’t.
It means something much more important.
We couldn’t have known at 12.
And that should influence how we treat the child finishing first, the child finishing tenth and the child finishing somewhere in the middle.
Performance and Potential Aren’t the Same Thing
Imagine two 12-year-olds running exactly the same 100m time.
Their performances are identical.
Their circumstances may be anything but.
One may have matured relatively early. The other may have substantial physical development still ahead.
One may already have several years of athletics training. The other may have only just discovered sprinting.
One may play several sports. Another may specialise in athletics. They may have different coaching histories, movement skills, motivation, strength, opportunities and experiences.
Over the next five years, their trajectories can look completely different.
That’s why we need to be careful about using the word potential when we’re really describing current performance.
We can measure today’s performance extremely well.
Predicting the eventual athlete is considerably harder.
Why This Matters at FAST
This isn’t simply an interesting historical exercise.
It affects how we coach.
FAST is increasingly measurement-driven. We record flying sprint times, acceleration performances, longer runs and competition results. We use video to examine mechanics and maintain longitudinal performance records.
We’ve also recently introduced our FAST Top Ten Performances, recognising the fastest performances achieved by FAST athletes across different ages.
There is no contradiction between celebrating those rankings and conducting a study that tells us rankings can change.
In fact, the two belong together.
We want the athlete who enters a FAST Top Ten to be proud of it. We want championship performances celebrated. We want athletes to chase personal bests, finals, medals and records.
Performance matters.
But the ranking tells us where an athlete is today.
It doesn’t give us permission to place a ceiling on everybody else.
It Matters for Parents Too
Junior sport can make comparison difficult to avoid.
Another child runs faster. Someone qualifies for ACT Schools. Someone wins Regionals. Someone suddenly improves enormously. Another athlete seems to stop improving.
It is very easy to interpret each result as evidence of where the children are heading.
The longer view tells us to be more patient.
Celebrate the PB.
Celebrate the medal.
Celebrate making the team.
But also celebrate learning to use starting blocks, improving running mechanics, trying a new event, training consistently, making friends and wanting to come back next week.
At eight, ten or twelve, keeping an athlete engaged in sport may ultimately be considerably more important than determining precisely where they sit in a ranking.
There is plenty of time for the clock to become more important.
Better Data Should Lead to Better Questions
The FAST ACT Development Study isn’t designed to create a formula that predicts future champions.
Historical competition results cannot tell us everything that happened in an athlete’s life. We don’t know the training history, biological maturity, injuries, other sports or personal circumstances behind every performance in the dataset.
So we need to be careful about what the numbers allow us to conclude.
But they can help us ask better questions.
Instead of asking:
“Is this 12-year-old talented?”
Perhaps we ask:
“How is this athlete developing?”
Instead of:
“Why isn’t she improving as quickly as she used to?”
We can ask whether the size of improvement we should reasonably expect has changed as she has grown older.
And rather than looking at the fastest children and deciding we’ve found tomorrow’s fastest adults, we can continue creating opportunities for a much wider group of athletes to develop.
We’re Just Getting Started
The FAST ACT Development Study will continue to grow.
The historical school results provide one layer. Contemporary competition performances provide another. FAST training data gives us another again.
Over time, we want to explore more ages, more events and more individual development pathways.
Not because we expect the data to tell us which 12-year-old will become the fastest 18-year-old.
Quite the opposite.
The more we examine athlete development, the clearer it becomes that we should be cautious about pretending we know.
Our job as coaches isn’t to predict children.
It is to understand development as well as we can, recognise performance when it happens, and create an environment in which athletes have the opportunity to discover what they can become.
Early performance matters.
But it isn’t destiny.
And how fast you are today is not necessarily where you finish.
Running Excellence grows. 🖤❤️
Comments are closed