We started the athletics mornings because a school asked us to look at eleven children who were fast and doing nothing with it.
None of them had been coached. Not badly coached: not coached. No start position, no arm action, no idea what to do in the first three strides, and every one of them running the first half of a sixty metre dash at full effort and the second half slowing down.
The programme was eight weeks, three mornings a week, and mostly drills that look nothing like racing. Starts, wall drills, a great deal of walking through what the legs are supposed to be doing, and short runs at less than full speed so the technique survived.
Every one of the eleven improved over sixty metres, and the median improvement was larger than any of us expected from technique alone. Two of them have gone on to train with a national age group programme, and the other nine are still running three mornings a week.
The lesson for us was blunt. There is more improvement available in teaching a child to run properly than in anything else we do, and almost nobody is doing it.
