How a Leeds sprint coach made every athlete's training visible

A junior sprinter gets faster less on the track than between track sessions — in the home and gym strength work that builds the power a 100m start needs. England Athletics, the sport's national governing body, builds its coaching pathway around exactly that consistent conditioning. Joel Whitaker, who coaches 12 junior sprinters at Aire Valley Athletics Club in Leeds, could see his athletes three evenings a week and had no idea whether they did a single rep of the work in between. His logged figure for that between-session work was 34%. One Bitir cohort took it to 81% in a season.

Where he started

Joel ran the 200m and 400m for a Yorkshire county side in his twenties before a hamstring tear ended his competing. He took his UK Athletics coaching qualifications over the following years and now leads the junior sprints group at Aire Valley, a community club training out of a council track in north Leeds three evenings a week.

Twelve athletes, aged 13 to 16, is a manageable number to coach on the track. The problem was never the track sessions. It was everything that happened in the roughly 165 hours a week he didn't see them.

Sprint development for that age group leans heavily on consistent strength and conditioning — short, repeatable home and gym sessions done two or three times between track nights. Joel set each athlete that work and trusted them to do it. His coordination ran on:

• One WhatsApp group for all 12 athletes and their parents, where session plans and competition dates went out and immediately scrolled away.
• A verbal "did everyone do their S&C this week?" at the start of each track session, answered by a chorus of vague nods.
• A paper training diary he handed out in September that, by October, no athlete was filling in.

He suspected the between-session work mostly wasn't happening. He had no way to know which athletes, or how often, so he couldn't coach against it.

The breaking point

The moment came at the start of the indoor season. Two of his most promising 15-year-olds plateaued at the same time — times flat for two months despite full track attendance. Joel assumed it was technical and spent three sessions reworking their block starts. It made no difference.

In a quiet conversation after training, both admitted they hadn't done a single home strength session since the summer. They'd turned up to every track night, nodded through every "did you do your S&C?", and quietly skipped the part that mattered most.

"I'd been coaching the 12 hours a week I could see and crossing my fingers on the 156 I couldn't," Joel says. "Two of my best kids had been coasting in plain sight, and the system I'd built made that completely invisible to me until their times stalled."

What he set up in Bitir

Joel rebuilt the group over a fortnight as a single Bitir cohort, with the deliberate aim of making the invisible between-session work visible without turning himself into a homework policeman. The structure draws on the same idea we set out in our guide to progress tracking: measure the behaviour, not just the outcome.

1. One private group for the squad. All 12 athletes and their parents in one space, replacing the WhatsApp group, with competition dates and session plans pinned instead of scrolling away.
2. A per-athlete season target. Each sprinter writes one personal goal on their own card — a season-best time to beat in their main event — visible to that athlete, their parent, and Joel.
3. A weekly between-session check-in. A recurring poll every Sunday where each athlete logs whether they did their two home strength sessions that week. Joel sees a per-athlete view at a glance, so a quiet skipper shows up in a day, not after a two-month plateau.
4. A competition availability poll. One structured poll per fixture — available, not available, unsure — closing 72 hours before entries are due, so relay and individual entries are built on confirmations.
5. Private nudges for the athletes who slip. When the Sunday log shows an athlete missed their strength work, Joel sends a short private message rather than calling it out in front of the squad — the approach we argue for in how to stop members drifting out of a group.

What changed in the numbers

Joel compared the season before the switch with the one after, across all 12 athletes.

The compliance figure is the one Joel cares about most, because it's the one that was invisible before and the one that drives everything else. Once he could see which athletes were doing the between-session work, the plateaus he used to misread as technical turned out, more often than not, to be missed strength sessions he could now catch in a week.

What he puts the change down to, in order:

1. The weekly log made the invisible visible. An athlete ticking "no" twice in a row is a conversation Joel can have on Monday, not a mystery he uncovers in February.
2. Per-athlete targets gave the home work a point. A 15-year-old chasing a season-best they wrote themselves does the strength session in a way they never did for a coach's abstract instruction.
3. The private nudge kept it kind. Nobody got shamed in front of the squad, so the athletes who slipped came back rather than going quiet.

What he would tell another sports coach

Joel's advice to other UK club coaches is direct.

• Coach the hours you can't see. The track session is the easy part; the development happens in the work between sessions, and if you can't see it, you aren't really coaching it.
• Make the between-session work a simple weekly log, not a paper diary nobody fills in. A two-tap "did you, yes or no?" gets answered where a training journal gets abandoned by October.
• Give each athlete a target in their own words. A self-written season best does more for compliance than any plan you hand them.
• Chase the slippers privately. An athlete who missed their strength work needs a quiet message, not a public callout — shame loses athletes, a private nudge keeps them.

The way Joel sets per-athlete targets and watches who needs a nudge follows the logic in our guide to check-in cadence — weekly, structured, and the same time every week.

What's next

Joel is extending the same per-athlete logging to the club's middle-distance group next season, and is using a full season of compliance data — now finally in one place — to show parents the link between the between-session work and their child's times. He's also piloting a shared end-of-season celebration post so the squad, who train as individuals, still finish the year feeling like a group.

Related reading: progress tracking for coaching groups: what to measure and how, and why group programmes lose members and how to stop it.