What is a good 20 times?

All's that matters is how the kids compare to each other

BTW ALMOST ALL 40 and 20 yard dash times are way off- hand held times are notoriously WAY off

If you feel like you need to know the relative straight line speed of players have them race. Competition brings out better efforts.

Groups of 10 top 3 go UP to the next group, bottom 3 go down a group, middle 4 stay put. After going through several cycles your fastest and slowest kids will seperate themselves out competitively, accurrately and without the long lines for 20s/40s


In a typical youth football game, not counting kicks there are just 2 plays covering 40 yards or more. Personally Im not seperating a kid out based on what may happen 2 times in a 70 snap game.

I was going to say almost exactly what DC said - the actual times don't matter a bit and with handheld times it's a waste of time trying to determine a baseline. All that matters is how they compare to each other. If more than one person is doing the timing, you should probably ignore the times completely. If one person does all the timing but they only time each kid once, you should probably still completely ignore the times (it's just to easy to be 1 or 2 tenths of a second early or late hitting the button at either or both the start and/or finish). If you're getting multiple times from single timer that are relatively consistent, then you should be able to use them to compare the kids. If not, ignore the times and find some other way to judge their relative speed - even if it means pulling those kids aside during a break and asking them to run a quick race for you. I'm just glad I never had to deal with a draft - it sounds like a royal pain in the rear with a very large likelihood of manipulation and other improper shenanigans.

Good luck.

A draft absolutely assures us that all our teams in our program are as equal as possible, we do not want a loaded team.

We start fresh each year we do not get to keep our returning players from year to year.

Our listed 25 yard dash times are absolutely my most valueble tool when getting into the late rounds and I do not know much about the kids.

I have found that timng agility drills is a waste of time for us because the same kids are on the top of the list for every drill we time. So to save time now we only record the 25 yard dash.

It's all we need. After 10 years our teams have always been very equal, and at the top of our leauge every year.

I may not have worded my last post very clear.

I don't just use the 25 yard dash times to draft my team I use more it in the late rounds for kids that I have not seen or do not have a clue who they are. I will simply take the fastest kid left on the board and make him into a football player and put him where he can have the best possible success to help the team to most.

We get 3-5 days of practice with the kids before we draft, we have meetings after every practice with depth charts for each position, if kids are out of position after day two we get them moved.

So we evaluate the kids the week of the draft and there is way more to it than the 25 yard dash times as far as evaluating a player. But I look at the time on every kid I want for each particular round.

The last rounds when I am basically drafting blind the faster the kid the better athlete he is in my experience.

Every year there are teams who get great talent and should kick butt but for some reason they do not have great team chemistry and may have kids out of position, or they don't have enough athletes on defense etc. but the talent pool of our program gets distributed evenly because of the draft. It's just that some coaches are better than others at getting kids in the right position, or getting the kids firing on all cylinders as a team.

"If every team is 100% even, why would there be a team who should "kick butt" ? All should be 100% equal talent wise- according to your post. I'm not sure I'm following, in one post you say all teams are equal across the board, in another you say there is a team that has an advantage and should "kick butt"


I'm not trying to talk in circles here, sorry.

My main point is that in our particular program we do not normally play each other, we have separate teams that play in a league, we want all our our teams to compete and be the best teams we can put on the field in our league. Other teams in our league do not draft, they try and load a team while other teams in their program are horrifyingly bad.

So we structure our draft and rate kids from at least 1-10 at each position so it's pretty hard to dumb it up, the best kids are distributed as evenly as we possibly can. Some coaches see something in a kid others my not thats life and of course we may not be 100% across the board be equal but we want to even the bar as much as possible.

There are teams at every level including some of ours who do not play up to their talent level and could or should Kick Butt. But don't because of different variables.

Yes, that is right, our program is 5th and 6th graders we have had as many as 80 kids sign up so we have four separate teams in our program drafted equal as possible to compete in a league against other programs in other towns.

I do know of a bigger town west of us who drafts teams to play each other. They hang each other out to dry in the draft.
One year they did not have a coach for one of the teams at the time of the draft so they got all the leftover kids not drafted.
Nice way to run a program.

We auto-time 40s (with a 20 yd split) for our oldest two age groups (8-9) and (10-12) during our combines locally. I don't have any data readily available for the 8-9 year olds, as I've never coached at that age level, but the time ranges listed below are typically for mostly 10 and sometimes 11 year olds coming into our Senior division via the draft. The pro (I) shuttle was hand timed.

As Dave, Doug and others have mentioned, the only measurables of real importance are their acceleration, quickness, lateral mobility and speed, relative to the other kids in your potential draft pool.

I just thought y'all (yes, I'm from Texas) might be curious as to what our best and worst times were from the sample I have. Out of the 78 kids on this sheet:

• The fastest 40 time was 5.7 (a kid we drafted in the 1st round @ 109 lbs)
  
• The fastest 20 split was 3.1
  
• The fastest 20 yard (pro) shuttle was 5.1
  
• The slowest 40 time was 9.5 (a kid we drafted very late @ 215 lbs)
  
• The slowest 20 split was 5.7
  
• The slowest 20 yard (pro) shuttle was 7.8
  
• 30 out of the 78 ran a 7.0 or faster 40
  
• 26 out of the 78 ran a 3.7 or faster 20 split
  
• 27 out of the 78 ran a 6.0 or faster 20 yd pro (I) shuttle
  

Dave Hartman
CYFL Coach

I havent timed 40s for at least 12 years but back in 2000 back in Omaha days, we added a coach by the Name of Jay Smith to our staff. He had coached defense at Canyon Springs CA HS- they won 2 USA Today National Championships while he was coaching there. I let him do what he wanted, he had never coached youth football before he moved to Omaha and coached for us. We ended up using his defense and special teams and after winning all his games year 1 but struggling mightily on offense with his Veer, he ended up running our offense.

He was coaching our select team and got to choose from about 125 kids at age 11-12. I remember vividly his fastest and slowest times his first year coaching with us. He had a 5.07 40 kid- Xavier Saxton- about 6' 1" and he HAD to play line by rule for us, cant remember what he weighed another 12 Marquis Spencer was timed at 5.2

Jay was a VERY successful HS Track and Field coach. His times my guess were pretty accurate, he brought his own tape etc
The following year he had a kid Benny Valentine that ran a 5.2 and the next fastest kid was a 5.6. Benny went on to play BBall for Bobby Knight at T-Tech. The tall kid was able to dunk at 13, single parent ghetto situation- ended up in alternative school etc never panned out in sports or life- Mom turned down offer of one of our coaches/wife/family for him to live with them. best athlete we ever had in the program. I never got to coach any of them.

The last year Jay was with us he saw the light and did more of the type of stuff we were doing.

I really have to laugh at 40 times though. I was talking to a program head back in 2000 before an age 13-14 game. I was complimenting him on how athletic his team looked as they went through pregame. He was telling me about so and so- 4.4 forty, another kid 4.3 I kid you NOT he was standing there with a straight face telling me he had 8th grade kids running 4.4 and 4.3
I didnt even bother correcting him or at least directing him to the nearest Olympic track camp ;D

Same guys program got tossed for using an illegal player the following year- AGAINST THE LEAGUE COMMISSIONERS TEAM
Kid you not, the league commish spots the monster, doesnt recall seeing him on any game film he had accumulated. Asks the kid in the handshake line what his name is, kid freaks runs over the hill while pulling his game jersey off and tossing it on the ground. NOTHING remotely like this has ever happened in the league. When called out at the league meeting, no one from that org would say who the kid was or how he got equip or on the team- I was embarrassed for the guy it was so awful- Commish 1-10 he was a 10 on the smarts side- the 4.4 guy was about a 1 LOL.

I got through the camp last night and I fill very lucky.

We did use the electronic timing from the High School.
(Helps when the high school Track Coach is heavy in our youth program).

One of my returners from last year 4th grader this year got beat only by a 6th grader. Also have a 3rd grader that finished fourth over-all. The camp was for 1st through 6th grade kids.

Not bad I will end up with the fastest 3rd and 4th graders.

This was the first time I have been evolved in a timed sprint.
As many of you have pointed out it did not take long to figure out who was the fastest group of kids without seeing the times.

Thanks for all the input. I learned a lot

Yep what are bigger lies, 40 times or fishing stories?

At NU in Osbornes last year 97 when they won the Nat Title- the FASTEST player on the team ran a 4.5- a LEGIT 4.5 is fast- yet all these High School yahoos and youth kids are running 4.5-4.6 ?? cmon.

When I hear people talk about 40 times I get my hip waders on and warm up my eyes for the rolling eyes Im going to have to do when I hear the lies. When the youth guy was telling me 4.3 and 4.4 I had to cover my mouth I was laughing so hard inside

The 5.07 kid we had weighed in at about 165-170, he was a something, huge waste of talent. Not great lateral speed though. Best overall athlete we ever had even though much lesser ones earned DI deals.

For what it is worth.
Our combine last year had 123 kids run 25 yards indoors on rubber field turf they were 8-9 year olds. I recorded in excel spread sheet and the AVERAGE time was 4.91 sec. The best time was 3.94.

After the draft I lined them up and ran them against one another to get top 10 it was surprising that my fastest who was a 4.1 in combo was my 3rd fastest when I raced them against one another. The kid who recorded a 4.6 time at the combine was actually faster
when they raced side by side.

I think it gives you an idea but a timed 25 is overrated.

I timed my gr 5-6 for a ballpark estimate of speed, and I would say under 4.0 for 20 yds is good speed. After that i used competitive, had the whole team run, and skim off the top person. There are few reasons I`d go to this, but sometimes it`s a nice reference. As for 40 times, I would be a little interested defensively to see who can track down a runner broken free, but only for this limited purpose.

Well, I've never picked a player based on how his mother looked, but (subconsciously, at least) that may have played a factor in which teams I chose to scrimmage in some years. I seem to recall scrimmaging teams from Yorba Linda and Palos Verdes (both of which have a very high percentage of hot moms) at a rate much higher than random occurance would predict. Maybe it's just a coincidence, or maybe my subconscious mind was leading me to schedule for the highest level of sideline eye candy. LOL.

Around here it's known as the "Yummy Mommy" factor.