Speed is how fast an athlete moves when nothing is in the way. Agility is how fast they can slow down, change direction and go again in response to something happening in front of them: a defender, a loose ball, a gap that's closing. The definition most coaches work from comes from a 2006 review by Sheppard and Young, who described agility as a rapid whole-body movement with a change of speed or direction made in response to a stimulus (Journal of Sports Sciences). That last part, the response, is the piece most training programs leave out.
Updated October 2026.
Why parents mix them up
Most flyers say speed and agility in one breath, so it's reasonable to assume they're one thing. They're two. A kid can run a fast 40 and still get turned around in a game. Another kid with an ordinary 40 can be the hardest player on the field to bring down. If the only thing anyone measures is the straight sprint, the second problem never shows up, and the family keeps paying for more sprint work for an athlete whose real issue is stopping.
Speed is mostly about the start
For a field athlete the part of speed that matters most is acceleration, the first handful of steps from a stance or a jog. Top-end speed earns its place too, on the long play, and we cover how much of each to keep in acceleration vs max velocity training. Speed work is easy to describe and hard to do well: short, all-out efforts with full rest between them, done while the athlete is fresh. Most of ours happens on the indoor turf lane in our building. It doesn't take much volume. It takes every rep being fast.
Agility is mostly about the brakes
Ask a young athlete to cut and watch the step right before the cut. Most of them can't stop hard, so they round the corner into a wide arc and hand the defender a free yard. The brakes set the limit on the cut far more than the gas does. Braking asks the legs to soak up force in a hurry, and that ability comes from strength and from practicing landing and stopping under control. It's why we don't start a new 13-year-old on reactive cutting. Strength and landing come first, then planned changes of direction, then the reactive version.
Planned cuts and reactive cuts are different skills
A 5-10-5 shuttle is change of direction: the athlete knows where both turns are before the whistle. It's a decent test and a useful drill. A game never tells anyone where the turn is. The defender sells a fake, the ball takes a bad hop, the hole closes, and the athlete has to read it and react in a fraction of a second. Getting very good at a cone pattern can leave a player just as slow to read a real play, which is why cones and ladders on their own don't carry far. We dug into that in do agility ladders make you faster. Reactive work means a partner, a coach pointing, a ball, anything the athlete has to answer instead of memorize.
Which one to fix first
That depends on the sport, the position and where the athlete is losing plays. A sprinter needs speed and very little else. Soccer and basketball players live on short bursts and constant redirection. In football, which is what we coach most, a running back needs a violent first step and a sharp cut, while a lineman needs the first step far more than any footwork. Our coach watches an athlete sprint and cut in the early sessions before deciding where the weeks go, because guessing costs a season.
Training both in the same week
You can, as long as neither gets trained tired. Speed and agility are both nervous-system work, so they belong at the start of a session with long rests, and the conditioning comes after. Put hard cutting on legs that just ran ten sprints and the athlete rehearses slow, sloppy cuts, which is the opposite of the goal. For most high school athletes in the off-season, two short speed sessions and two change-of-direction sessions a week is plenty. In season it drops, because games and practice already carry a lot of both.
If you can't tell whether your athlete's problem is the sprint or the stop, bring them in. One-on-one coaching at our Ocean Township facility on Route 35 starts with a free consultation, and you can set that up on our contact page or look through the training programs first.