Coach Donnell Boucher Was Right About His Data

Prior to working at Plae, Coach Donnell Boucher worked at The Citadel as the head S&C coach. He worked there for years and is considered an OG of "modern" S&C. So to all the young coaches (less than 5 years in the game) you probably don't remember when he worked at The Citadel, well now you know. Coach was one of the first filming the content of what the teams on campus were doing - sprints, lifting, condo, etc...he shared it all. 

As a young coach myself when he was posting all of this I was following what he was doing and would consume and marinate on what he was doing, why he was doing it, and how to apply it in my setting. 

One of the easiest things to adopt into my program was how coach added in context to the speed work. I did not appreciate it then as much as I do now, but I still loved it. The concept was so simple, tell everyone on the outside world all of the factors that lead to the time being ran. When we know the time of day, weather, timing system, and surface we can then actually compare how my athletes ran compared to his if I wanted to. Here is the problem, coaches are not doing this now. We are lucky if we get someone posting GPS speeds on their socials, and many times we do not get the GPS company along with the speeds. This is not helpful. 

You don't have to look on social media for a long time to see it is not only coaches randomly posting about speeds without context, there are companies doing the same thing. Who are these companies? The ones I see doing it the most are Vald and OVR. There might be others doing it as well, if you see it happening be on the look out. They will try to tell you what your athletes should be running based on normative data even though you have NO idea how the data was collected, the population, the build up speed, surface they ran on, etc...none of it. Yet you are supposed to believe it? Get out of here. To those who are not as mad as me about it let me explain. 

More likely than not, your older athletes will run faster than your younger. More likely than not when you run a longer build up you will run faster than with a short build up. More likely than not you will run faster on a hard surface than a soft one. More likely than not you will run faster when you have a long distance/time to slow down/decel from the rep compared to having a small facility with a wall near the end of the run forcing you to slow down fast. See how all that nuance is GONE when you see "if you are an elite high school male you should run your 40 in _____ seconds."

That's the other part I forgot to mention, many times on these 40s, 20s, or 10s that get posted there is nothing about the build in time? Was there no build in sprint and they started on the yard line? Awesome, no big deal, in fact that is how we tested at Iowa. We had a hand start and a laser time. Coach Doyle was always the one with the hand start on the lasers so all the records were someone consistent. But guess what? You cannot compare that 10 yard dash to the 10 yard dash we did at Towson where players started 1 yard back from the laser start and laser finish. 

In this way anyone can be the coach administering the assessment. You also cannot compare that time, or what we did at Iowa with what Elon University and Dr. Nick DiMarco PhD does with the athlete on the 10 yard line, laser on the 1 yard line and finish. Technically that is a 9 yard dash. Just like mine was an 11 yard dash. Both are perfectly valid and reliable. They are testing starting acceleration speed and both are repeatable. Just cannot compare the two. Nick does a great job adding context to the data he shares. He was the one who showed me what Donnell was doing with data and context. 

Yet, these companies are trying to get you to believe them that this is the speed your athletes need to run. WRONG. No way. Not true. Don't buy into it. Unless you get all the data that Coach Boucher gave (that I applied and show you in the video above) you need to ignore it. Ignore data that does not have context, that data is just numbers on a piece of paper and is worse than no data at all.

Dr. Justin Lima, PhD, RSCC*D, CSCS, SCCC, is the President and CEO of Strength Coach Network with over 17 years of experience in strength and conditioning, including coaching roles at Iowa, Maryland, and Towson University. A national conference speaker, he actively serves both the NSCA and CSCCa through leadership and committee roles. He is the author of Navigating a Career in Strength and Conditioning (Cognella, 2026) and is currently contributing to a textbook with Human Kinetics. His work focuses on advancing the profession through education, research, and practical coaching applications.