WHY TIMING MATTERS MORE IN SPRINTING THAN PEOPLE THINK

In the weight room, you know exactly what you did. Sets, reps, weight on the bar. You can add five pounds next week and know it was five pounds.

Sprinting has no equivalent. The work is running as fast as you can, and without accurate timing there is no number attached to it. You cannot tell whether a change in your training made an athlete faster, because you have no reliable way to measure faster.

That is the real cost of bad timing. Not that the number is wrong, but that you cannot train methodically without a number you trust.

There is a second reason: recruitment. Recruiters look at 40 times and other metrics in sports where sprints are a big factor. When two athletes have similar film and similar stats, the faster time is what separates them.

HOW FAR OFF IS A STOPWATCH

Research on 40-yard testing puts the difference between hand times and electronic times at around two tenths of a second, with hand times reading fast.

The mechanism is human reaction on both ends. The timer starts late because they are reacting to the athlete moving, and stops early because they can see the finish coming and anticipate it.

THE INCONSISTENCY IS THE BIGGER PROBLEM

Two tenths of error would be manageable if it were always two tenths. You could subtract it and move on.

It is not. The same coach timing the same athlete twice will be off by different amounts each time. Reaction speed varies with attention, angle, fatigue, and whether you were watching the athlete or the watch.

So when an athlete comes back a tenth faster than last month, you cannot tell whether they improved or whether you were quicker on the button. At the high school level, real improvement in a sprint often shows up in hundredths. A measuring tool with two tenths of random error cannot see it.

WHAT OUR GATES MEASURE

Our timing gates are accurate to roughly five milliseconds.

That number comes from the sensor's refresh rate. The gate reads 250 times per second.

We verified it with physics. Our gates came in accurate to around five milliseconds.

WHEN A STOPWATCH IS FINE

For longer efforts, a stopwatch is reasonable. In 400-meter training, two tenths on a fifty second run is a small fraction of the total, and a coach tracking pace across a season will still see what they need to see.

The shorter the effort, the worse it gets. On a 40-yard dash of about five seconds, two tenths is a large share of the difference between athletes, and larger than most of the improvement you are trying to detect.

If the thing you are measuring is bigger than your error, a stopwatch works. In sprinting it usually is not.

If your program cannot afford timing equipment, we build gates and donate them. You can apply here.