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I came across this paper recently, which I thought might be an interesting one for discussion: Thompson, A., I.N. Bezodis, and R.L. Jones. 'An In-depth Assessment of Expert Sprint Coaches' Technical Knowledge'. Journal of Sports Science. 27(8): 855-861. 2009. Technical aspects of speed development is a topic which is of interest to many anyway, but additionally a few interesting points are raised with respect to coach education and specifically how applied knowledge/learning can best be delivered. Welcome members' thoughts...

Dear Paul, This is indeed an interesting article. I believe that the issue discussed in the paper is not easily solved, rather it is a slow process of bridging the gap between learning from expert opinions and learning from sports science. Considering that a forum is about sharing personal opinions, let me briefly share mine. My personal opinion resembles what the authors of the article state in their conclusion, and is that it can probably best be done through CPD/workshops which bring together the experts and the scientists as panels to the debate, so that it can be demonstrated to those who learn and will one day be the experts how much 'instinctive knowledge from the field' and sport science can support each other. I was recently at such workshop in Belgium where they did this for football, and it was a great success in opening new debates that help to bridge the gap. That being said, it seems like technical sports like sprinting, jumping, throwing, but also swimming, cycling, etc are ideal to bridge the gap between expert knowledge and sports science through workshops, yet only few of them actually take place for as far as I know. In the latter type of sports the component skill has much more weighing towards performance than in football (without offending footballers!), yet coaches tend to be opinionated (often to stand out from the crowd and become popular). Please let me remind you that this is merely personal opinion and not based on factual data. Besides sharing personal opinion, let me also briefly mention what I currently try to do to bridge the gap between expert coaches and scientists (related to sprinting). In my role as academic, I teach the biomechanics of sprinting to our undergraduates. It must however be said that most of the good literature is aged and hardly up to date, and that if anything is currently published it is because of its media potential (e.g. article 'How fast could Usain Bolt have run? A dynamical study in American Journal of Physics) rather than its scientific rigour. This does make it a little difficult to bring across a clear picture of sprint running science to our future sport scientists, and if they can't have a clear picture, how will they ever be able to convince an expert coach of the value of their ideas? As a consequence, in my role as a scientist, I currently am working on an international project in which we try to bring science back to international athletics meetings (scientific equipment has for the last two decades often been banned as they often tend to sit in front of the advertisements of the sponsors etc). Particularly through involving the expert coaches in the debate on which equipment should be used and for which purpose we tend find a bridge across the gap that sits between us. Hopefully it will materialise in new uptodate materials to support sport science teaching of sprinting. Eventually, one of the forms of dissemination of our results will definitely be to organise such workshop(s) at which both scientists and experts are invited and can share their ideas.