All sports are built around a collection of bodily movements we call “skills”.  Throwing a football is a skill.  Clearing a hurdle is a skill.  Hitting a tennis serve is a skill. Throwing a curveball is a skill.  The list is ten miles long. Skills are the “what” of sport – the things we see athletes do.  

But how athletes perform these skills is called “technique” – the particular movement of the arm, the direction of the step, the rotation of the shoulders in relation to the hips… and so on.  

There are a lot of moving parts in even the simplest of sports skills, and what I’m going to show you in this little essay is how even small mistakes in technique can ruin a skill faster than you can blink an eye.

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There are two types of mistakes in technique: The first type happens when an athlete moves one part of his or her body incorrectly.  

The second type happens when an athlete gets one movement out of order by either rushing it or being slow with it (a mistake of timing).  

Either type of technical mistake can ruin a skill in hard-to-detect ways, but sometimes it can be eye-popping!

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I once coached a young girl who made one of these “out-of-order” mistakes that darn near popped my eyes out of my head!

She was an excellent athlete and a fantastic student and person.  I began working with her when she was eight, and the year she was nine she had become good enough to qualify for the American Championships in both the high jump and long jump.  The meet was held at Knoxville, Tennessee that year, and my team arrived a day early, so we could settle into our lodging and get a feel for the facilities on which they would be competing.  

It was on the long jump runway on that day before the competition began that she popped my eyes!

…But before I go on with this little story, I need to give you a short lesson on long jumping.

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A good long jump is accomplished in five parts:  Speed of the approach…accuracy of hitting the take-off board…height of lift at the takeoff…correctness of the flight phase…and efficiency of the landing position.

But of those five phases of a jump, the two most important ones are speed of the approach and height of lift at the takeoff.  If an athlete runs fast and jumps high, he or she will fly through the air a long way.  The other three phases of the jump add only inches to the jump’s length.

But it’s at the takeoff where virtually every young (or poorly trained) jumper makes one of these “mistakes of timing” by rushing to assume the landing position at the take-off instead of striving for height!  If you don’t believe me, just take your camera or smartphone to a youth track meet and film the long jump.  Then freeze your picture of each jumper at the instant of take-off.  Invariably, they will all be reaching for their landing position with their arms and swinging leg as they leave the ground… thus killing their height…which kills their jump!

As you might guess, long jump coaches will spend a ton of time working on takeoff technique (proper arm actions, proper knee drive, etc.), and one drill you will certainly use is called “pop-ups”. By doing pop-ups we drill the correct takeoff technique into the jumper’s muscle memory by freezing them in the takeoff position and asking them to hold that position until they land.

End of lesson.

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Now back to my eye-popping story….

Well, that morning at the long jump pit at the University of Tennessee in Knoxville, my main order of business was to get this young jumper’s approach adjusted to the runway so she was hitting the take-off board. The drill I was using to get her steps was full approach pop-ups…which meant she was freezing in her takeoff position once she became airborne and landing in the sand with her takeoff leg still directly below her. 

Well, after a couple or three of these full-approach pop-ups, I noticed that the indentation her landing foot was making in the sand looked to be an unusually long distance into the pit.  

So I said to her, “That was a really long popup.  Let me measure it.”

So I did.  And it measured 15 feet from the takeoff board to where the heel of her foot touched down in the pit.   

And this was where my eyes started popping… because this nine-year-old gal’s best competitive jumps that season were in the high twelves and low thirteens.  Fifteen feet was something around two feet further than her farthest jump…and close to the national record for a nine-year-old girl!

Well, my first thought was that I had made a mistake in my measurement, so I had her perform a couple or three more of these full-approach popups, but my measurements weren’t wrong.  They were all around 15 feet.  She was jumping far enough to win the American championships without even assuming a landing position.

Well, as you might guess, the two of us were elated!  We were thinking that the following day when the competition commenced and she added the landing phase to her fifteen-foot popups, she would clobber the field and maybe break the national record with a jump somewhere close to 16 feet in length.  

But…no such thing happened. 

The next day this young girl with the fifteen-foot pop-ups made the beginner’s mistake of reaching for her landing position instead of striving for height… and she placed second with jumps in the thirteens, as I recall.  In other words, she made a “mistake of timing” by reaching for the landing at the take-off instead of jumping high…and this single mistake of technique knocked two feet off her jumps! 

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Coach…here’s the message I’m trying to get across with my little story:

When you’re teaching the skills of your sport to your students small things make big differences!   

Every skill is dependent on proper technique, and one critical part of technique is timing. Virtually every sports skill begins when the athlete plants a foot and pushes against Mother Earth… then transfers the force of that push up through the joints and levers of his or her body to deliver it in some sport-specific manner that converts it to a throw or kick or swing or twisting dive from a springboard.  And this transfer of force must be executed in a precise order with immaculate timing.